In wake of Meta settlement, ASU expert shares insights into relationship between teens and tech

Last week, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion in penalties and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram in response to a lawsuit claiming the company’s platforms were intentionally designed to addict children and teenagers.

The settlement is one of the largest consumer protection settlements in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

Arizona will receive $223 million from the suit, with the money earmarked for remediation of technology addiction.

In addition, Meta must implement a sweeping set of safety features created to protect children — including mandating daily time limits.  

The agreement comes as parents, educators and researchers continue to ask how young people can use powerful digital tools in ways that are healthy, useful and age appropriate.

Experts say the issue is not just screen time, but how young people engage with technology, what features keep them online and what that use may replace, including sleep, schoolwork and in-person relationships.

The lawsuit offers a timely opportunity to consider what society has learned from social media — lessons that may be critical as generative AI becomes a growing part of young people’s lives. 

“I see the Meta settlement as an important step forward, particularly as we enter the AI era,” said Thao Ha, an associate professor in Arizona State University’s Department of Psychology. “We have an opportunity to learn from what happened with social media and study the developmental effects of AI rather than trying to catch up years later.”

ASU News checked in with Ha, a developmental psychologist and director of the @HEART Lab (Healthy Experiences Across Relationships and Transitions Lab), to get her thoughts about the settlement, why adolescence is a particularly sensitive period for digital experiences and what healthy technology use can look like for teenagers. 

Note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Question: Why is adolescence a particularly sensitive period for digital experiences?

Answer: Adolescence is a sensitive period of tremendous learning and change. Young people become intensely motivated to form close friendships, fall in love, gain independence and discover who they are. 

At the same time, they are especially responsive to social experiences and feedback.

Technology is now embedded in all of these areas, and certain kinds of technology use may interfere with sleep, mood, attention, school, physical activity or time with other people, particularly when technology is difficult to disengage from or begins replacing other important experiences.

Adolescence being a sensitive period is not only about vulnerability. It is also a period of tremendous opportunity. Young people are learning rapidly, which means technologies designed with adolescent development in mind could support learning, connection and healthy development.

Q: The lawsuit requires time limits on screen use, as well as "night mode," which blocks access to main engagement features between midnight and 6 a.m. How helpful are these restrictions?  

A: I think Meta’s time restrictions can help, particularly when social media use is displacing sleep, school, physical activity or time with family and friends. 

Social media platforms have historically made it extremely easy to continue scrolling, so pauses, nighttime restrictions and daily limits can create opportunities for young people to disengage.

At the same time, screen time alone does not tell us very much about whether technology use is healthy or harmful. Research examining screen time and adolescent mental health has generally found small and inconsistent associations. 

Two adolescents can spend exactly the same amount of time on their phones and have completely different experiences. One may be talking with a close friend, creating something or doing homework. Another may be scrolling late at night and losing sleep.

We need to ask what young people are doing online, why they are doing it, how those experiences affect them and what their technology use may be replacing. Is it taking time away from sleep, physical activity, school, family or face-to-face relationships?

So, I see time restrictions as one useful safeguard, but not as a solution to all of the ways digital media can affect adolescent development. We also need to look at the design of the platforms themselves. Many features are designed to keep young people engaged for as long as possible, and we need to ask whether those features are good for adolescent development.

Q: What have we learned from social media about introducing new technologies into young people’s lives?

A: For me, an important lesson is that technology can become embedded in young people’s lives much faster than science can understand its developmental effects. 

Social media has created important opportunities for connection, community, self-expression and learning. At the same time, we have learned that certain features and patterns of use can interfere with sleep, mental health, relationship experiences and everyday functioning. 

To this day, there is still no simple answer to whether social media is “good” or “bad” for adolescents. It matters what young people are doing online, why they are there and what those experiences may be replacing. The same technology can also affect different young people very differently.

The Meta settlement is the result of an incredible bipartisan effort involving many families and young people, organizations and lawmakers. It took a long time to get here, and I think we should learn from that experience as generative AI rapidly enters young people’s lives. We should not wait until AI has affected millions of young people in ways we do not yet understand. We have an opportunity now to study these technologies early and help build generative AI that benefits youth development.

Q: What makes interacting with generative AI different from using social media?

A: Social media largely changed how young people interact with other people. Generative AI introduces something fundamentally different as the technology itself can become the interaction partner. It can respond to a young person, remember previous conversations, offer advice and emotional support, and be available whenever they want to talk. 

For the first time, technology can participate directly in some of the social and relational experiences through which adolescents are developing. This is particularly important during adolescence, when young people are learning how relationships work. They are learning how to navigate conflict, communicate their needs, take another person’s perspective, be vulnerable, establish boundaries and repair relationships. Human relationships require reciprocity. Another person has their own needs, feelings and perspectives, and they will not always agree with us or respond the way we want.

AI can be continuously available, highly responsive and personalized around the user. This could be incredibly helpful. A young person could practice a difficult conversation, think through a friend’s perspective or get support that helps them go back and deal with a problem in their real relationship. 

In our recent work, we have been particularly concerned about what happens if AI begins to replace some of those experiences. If a young person turns to AI instead of having a difficult conversation with a parent, friend or romantic partner, they may miss opportunities to practice the relationship skills that are learned through those interactions.

Much of the current focus is on what happens during the interaction with AI. From a developmental perspective, we also need to understand what happens afterward. Does AI help young people navigate relationships with parents, friends and romantic partners, or does it begin to replace those interactions?

Q: What lessons from social media should we apply now as young people begin using AI?

A: We should not wait! One of the problems with social media was that by the time we started to understand some of its effects, it was already deeply embedded in adolescents’ lives. 

AI is developing incredibly quickly, and we have a chance to do this differently. We need developmental research alongside the development of these technologies. I want to know what happens when adolescents interact with AI repeatedly over months and years, what they learn from those interactions and whether those experiences carry into their relationships with parents, friends and romantic partners.

If AI helps a teenager practice a difficult conversation, for example, does that make the actual conversation with a friend easier? Or do they eventually prefer talking to AI because the interaction is easier and more predictable?

Working with my youth advisory board has also taught me how important it is to involve young people in this work from the beginning. Adults are making decisions about technologies that adolescents are often already using in ways we did not anticipate. We need their experiences and perspectives in the research and in the design of these systems. With AI, we have an opportunity to build the evidence while the technology is still developing, and use that evidence to build something that supports healthy adolescent development. 

Q: What does a healthy relationship with technology look like for a teenager?

A: The goal would not be to keep teenagers away from technology. Technology is already part of how young people learn, socialize, create and communicate. We are also seeing young people use AI in incredibly creative ways to build projects and tools that would have been difficult or impossible before. 

For me, healthy technology use means that technology adds something to a young person’s life without taking away from the experiences they need to grow, including sleep, physical activity, learning and time with family and friends. What that looks like will differ across young people and technologies.

An hour FaceTiming a close friend is very different from an hour scrolling through content that makes you feel worse about yourself, which is why I am less interested in one universal amount of “healthy screen time” than in what young people are actually experiencing. I would like us to build technology that helps young people create, learn, connect with other people and strengthen the relationships that are important to them.