Meta is taking out full-page newspaper ads to tell YouTube and TikTok they need to match the teen safety rules it just signed onto, according to Bloomberg.
The ads landed Friday, August 28, in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, reprinting an open letter that calls Meta’s new two-hour daily cap on Instagram and Facebook a “new industry standard.” Meta only agreed to that cap, plus a midnight-to-6 a.m. lockout and muted school-hour notifications, after settling with state attorneys general for as much as $18 billion, and now it is arguing the whole thing falls apart if teenagers just open TikTok or YouTube the second Instagram cuts them off.
“We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” the letter says. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.”
The August 26 settlement carves out about $5.3 billion so Meta only pays it if YouTube and TikTok adopt a one-hour daily limit, night mode, and age checks, and each put up a matching sum.
Neither TikTok nor Google, which owns YouTube, has said anything publicly, and that silence is sitting next to fresh FTC pressure on YouTube over how it enforces its own rules, so a teen time-limit fight would be a second headache in the same week.
The deal covers participating US states, not Canada, though Ottawa often follows the US, UK, EU, and Australia on this file. The same lockouts could show up here if the apps decide one set of clocks is easier than two, and smaller networks are tinkering with feeds, with Bluesky adding a Discover opt-out so people can keep posts off the algorithmic pile.
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Social Media is the home of people with low self-esteem or narcissism. It should be avoided at all costs.