By Aruliniyan Mahalingam
JAFFNA — Opening a phone for a quick look at Instagram and surfacing forty minutes later is such a common failure of self-discipline that most people have stopped calling it one. American authorities spent years arguing it was never a failure of discipline at all. In a case brought by 47 states, the District of Columbia and several U.S. territories, they accused Meta of building features whose purpose was to keep young users watching, scrolling and coming back.
On Wednesday, Meta Platforms - - the parent company of Facebook and Instagram- - settled. It agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion over the next decade and to rebuild, feature by feature, the way teenagers experience its two biggest apps. A separate $1 billion agreement with Texas the same day brought Meta’s combined settlements with the states to more than $18 billion, a sum matched in American consumer litigation only by the tobacco settlements of the 1990s. The states filed the agreement in federal court in Oakland on Wednesday morning, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved it, cutting short a trial that had opened on 18 August. Mark Zuckerberg, who had been expected to testify again, will not have to.
The four states leading that trial had been seeking roughly $200 billion. Meta’s shares closed up about 1 percent.
Roughly $12 billion of the money is guaranteed. The remaining $5 billion falls due only if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and accept comparable penalties and product changes — a clause Meta’s lawyers said they negotiated deliberately, to set an industry standard rather than be singled out. Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, used a blog post to implore the company’s rivals to join, arguing that teenagers move too fluidly across dozens of apps for one firm’s rules to accomplish much alone. It is, whatever else it is, the first time a social media company has put billions of dollars behind the proposition that its competitors should be bound too.
The changes themselves may matter more than the money. Teen accounts on Instagram and Facebook will carry a combined two-hour daily limit, which parents can switch off, interrupted by mandatory prompts after fifteen minutes of continuous use and again at sixty and ninety. Feeds shut off between midnight and 6 a.m. Push notifications go quiet from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., and again on school days between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. — the latter running only from 15 August to 15 June, which is to say the American school year. Meta will hide the running tally of likes on a minor’s posts by default, restrict cosmetic-surgery and extreme makeup filters, let teenagers switch off autoplay, and strengthen both age verification and parental controls, alongside new safeguards around bullying, eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm. The obligations run five years, or ten at a tighter one-hour cap if Snap, TikTok and YouTube sign on.
Teenagers will be offered a non-personalised feed, one that does not use Meta’s recommendation system to select what they see. They are not given it. Meta must periodically remind them the option exists, and parents may lock it on. Otherwise the recommendation engine runs as before. The agreement does not require Meta to abandon personalised recommendations or targeted advertising at all.
Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb was blunter than the filings about why the states sued, accusing Meta of having exploited children for profit while telling the public its products were safe. Meta denies wrongdoing and says the agreement builds on protections it had already begun putting in place.
Not everyone signed. Florida and New Mexico stayed out, alongside Texas, which cut its own deal. Florida’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, called the payouts “peanuts” and said he would see Meta at trial. New Mexico had already won: a jury there ordered Meta to pay $375 million in March for consumer-protection violations, and a further order this month has pushed the state’s total toward $1 billion. A day after that March verdict, a California jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in the design of their platforms and ordered them to pay $6 million between them. Meta still faces bellwether personal-injury trials in California state court beginning in October and a long tail of school-district lawsuits. It expects to book roughly $10 billion in legal costs this quarter alone.
THE SAME APPS, A DIFFERENT COUNTRY
Sri Lanka collected none of that money, and no Sri Lankan regulator has attempted anything resembling the multistate effort that produced it. The products are identical.
Facebook still commands an 81 percent usage share among the country’s internet users, according to the Digital Outlook Sri Lanka 2026 report, with YouTube close behind at 72 percent. TikTok has climbed to 48 percent, up six points in a year, even as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram all lost ground — Sri Lankan attention drifting toward short-form video exactly as it has everywhere else.
The 2024 Global School-based Student Health Survey, run jointly by the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Education with WHO support, found that 28.4 percent of Sri Lankan students aged 13 to 17 spend three or more hours a day on their phones for social media, messaging or browsing. Among 16- and 17-year-olds, the figure is 40.6 percent. Only about three in four said their parents set any rules for that use at all.
Set those results beside the last comparable survey, taken in 2016, and the direction is unmistakable. Loneliness among adolescents more than doubled, from 9 to 22.4 percent. The share of students unable to sleep because of worry nearly tripled, to 11.9 percent. Depressive symptoms stood at 18 percent overall and 26.3 percent among the oldest students surveyed. Those who reported seriously considering suicide rose from 9.4 to 15.4 percent; those who reported an attempt, from 6.8 to 9.1 percent.
WHAT JAFFNA ALREADY KNOWS
On the evening of Aug. 11, Governor N. Vethanayahan called senior health and education officials, medical specialists and the head of the University of Jaffna’s sociology department to the Governor’s Secretariat. He ordered that coordinated prevention efforts be restored without delay.
The immediate concern was 80 deaths recorded in Jaffna District over the previous three months. Specialists at the meeting put the district’s rate at about 30 per 100,000, roughly twice the national figure, and said the increase was particularly concerning among young people and women. The official account of the meeting did not use the word suicide, referring instead to deaths resulting from “impulsive decisions.”
Nobody at the meeting blamed a telephone, and there is no basis for doing so. Jaffna carries the consequences of war, unresolved disappearances, household debt, alcohol dependence and other social pressures. Young people across Sri Lanka have also lived through a pandemic and an economic collapse, while those in the North and East have grown up with the consequences of a war fought by the generation before them. Academic pressure, family difficulties and exposure to violence add to that burden. There is no single explanation for the distress.
But research increasingly suggests that heavy internet and social media use belongs in the discussion.
A 2025 study of 1,045 students in seven Gampaha District schools found that 24.11 percent had clinically significant depressive symptoms and 60.10 percent reported psychological distress. A separate 2026 study of school-going adolescents in the Western Province, published in JMIR Formative Research, found that 12.6 percent of current internet users met the criteria for internet addiction.
The findings are not confined to schoolchildren. At Eastern University’s Faculty of Health-Care Sciences, researchers found that 52 percent of undergraduates surveyed showed some degree of social media addiction, although most cases were mild and rates were higher among female students.
The broader mental-health picture is troubling as well. In January, Dr. Dhammika Alahapperuma, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said nearly 39 percent of Sri Lankans between the ages of 10 and 24 experience some form of mental stress.
None of these figures proves that social media is causing Sri Lanka’s mental-health problems. They do show why the way young people use their phones — and the way the apps on those phones are designed to keep them there — can no longer be treated as a separate question.
WHAT THE BRAIN IS ACTUALLY DOING
In 2016, researchers at UCLA scanned teenagers’ brains while showing them photographs on a simulated version of Instagram, secretly varying how many likes each photograph appeared to have. Images displayed with more likes lit up the nucleus accumbens, a hub of the brain’s reward circuitry, more strongly than the same images displayed with few. The teenagers were significantly more likely to like a popular photograph themselves — even one posted by a stranger, even one showing risky behaviour such as drinking or smoking.
A longer study, led by researchers at the University of North Carolina and published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2023, followed 169 sixth- and seventh-graders for three years. Those who checked Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat most habitually developed a measurably different sensitivity to social reward and punishment than those who checked least. Children who grow up checking social media constantly, the study’s senior author, Eva Telzer, said at publication, become hypersensitive to feedback from their peers.
Part of what makes the checking hard to stop is that it pays off unpredictably. A notification may carry a message, a compliment, something worth seeing — or nothing at all. Psychologists have known since the middle of the last century that rewards delivered on an unpredictable schedule produce far more persistent behaviour than rewards delivered reliably.
Adolescents appear especially susceptible. The parts of the brain that respond to reward mature earlier than those governing judgment and impulse control. Infinite scrolling compounds the problem by removing the natural stopping point. A newspaper runs out of pages. A television programme ends. A feed does neither.
Late-night use raises a separate concern. Screen light and stimulating content make sleep harder to come by, and insufficient sleep in adolescence has been linked to problems with mood, attention and anxiety. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory warning that social media poses a profound risk of harm to the mental health of children and adolescents.
That advisory was careful about what the evidence can support, and so are most researchers. No one has established that social media causes mental illness in every child who uses it heavily. A teenager who is already lonely, anxious, or depressed may simply spend more time online. The platforms also deliver real goods: friendship, information, support not available elsewhere.
Meta made these arguments in court. But the states were pressing a different question — not what social media does to a child, but what the product was built to do.
Infinite scrolling is not illegal. Neither is a notification arriving at 1 a.m., or an algorithm serving up more of whatever keeps a teenager watching. The states’ case was that these features were engineered, together and deliberately, to hold young people’s attention, and that Meta knew enough about the consequences to be liable under consumer-protection law. Rather than test that argument in front of an Oakland jury, Meta settled.
TWO BILLS, AND A LAW
Sri Lankan law has almost nothing to say about any of this — and two quite different debates have been running together in Colombo all year.
The Online Safety Act, No. 9 of 2024, gives a state commission broad powers over online statements deemed false, prohibited or otherwise harmful. It was promoted partly as a shield for women and children. Rights groups, including the Global Network Initiative, argued that what it actually delivers is an instrument that can be turned on journalists and critics. On June 26, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who opposed the law from the opposition benches, told Parliament that his government would not enforce it in its current form and had secured cabinet approval to draft a replacement.
Whatever replaces it, the Online Safety Act was never designed to answer the question at the centre of the American case: whether the design of a platform can itself harm a child.
The proposals that do address children’s use came later. In January, Women and Child Affairs Minister Saroja Savithri Paulraj said the government was weighing a ban on social media for children under 12, on the recommendation of child psychiatrists. By May, officials were also considering a complete ban on screen use for children under five.
In June, Opposition MP Faiszer Musthapha tabled a private member’s bill setting the minimum age for a social media account at 16. It would also permit restrictions on how long children may use social media and at what hours, enforced by an authorised commissioner under the National Child Protection Authority.
Enforcement is the hard part. Nothing in either proposal explains what stops a 14-year-old from entering a false date of birth and registering as an adult. Reports on Ms. Paulraj’s proposal said the government planned consultations with telecommunications companies and other parties, but described no method of verifying age.
Researchers at LIRNEasia have made the same point more sharply: Sri Lanka risks importing the headline feature of Australia’s approach, the age limit, without the machinery underneath it, meaning workable age verification, a properly funded regulator and a compliance timetable.
Australia’s own experience is instructive. Even after the restrictions took effect, younger teenagers went on finding their way onto the platforms they had been barred from, often by lying about their age.
DOES SRI LANKA NEED ITS OWN CASE?
A comparable lawsuit would be difficult to mount here. The American cases were driven by state attorneys general with subpoena power over Meta’s internal records and the resources to spend years fighting one of the largest companies on earth.
Sri Lanka has consumer-protection law, including the Consumer Affairs Authority Act, but a far thinner regulatory apparatus behind it. No Sri Lankan regulator has attempted a case against a technology company on anything approaching this scale.
Other jurisdictions have skipped litigation and written rules instead. Australia has restricted social media use by children. Britain is weighing similar measures for under-16s. The European Commission has investigated TikTok over features that encourage prolonged use, including infinite scrolling and autoplay, and is considering broader consumer-protection rules covering such practices. The methods differ, but the object of scrutiny is the same: not only what appears on a platform, but how the platform is built to keep people on it.
Sri Lanka has concentrated almost entirely on content, through instruments like the Online Safety Act. The evidence elsewhere suggests design deserves at least equal attention.
Meta is also trying to get other major platforms to accept similar restrictions. Under the settlement, another $5 billion depends on companies including Snap, TikTok and YouTube agreeing to comparable changes.
If that happens, some of the protections introduced for American teenagers could eventually reach users elsewhere, including Sri Lanka. That could happen before Colombo passes its own legislation.
The important question for Sri Lanka, then, is which protections will be introduced globally and which will remain limited to American users.
WHY SHOULD SRI LANKAN TEENS GET LESS?
The GSHS report found that Sri Lankan teenagers were lonelier and having more trouble sleeping than eight years earlier. But the report was not about phones. Screen time received little attention in a document that examined many other problems facing young people. That itself raises a question: has Sri Lanka paid enough attention to the role phones and social media may play in the mental health of its young people?
Meta’s settlement does not prove that social media causes mental illness. The science remains unsettled, and there are many other factors involved. But the $18 billion settlement shows that the way these platforms are designed is now being taken seriously by regulators in the United States.
Sri Lankan teenagers use the same platforms as teenagers in the United States. If Meta accepts that certain changes can make its products safer for American teenagers, Sri Lanka has a simple question to ask: Why should its children receive anything less?
