Daybreak - Meta's $18 billion settlement has India looking for the wrong answer

Episode Date: September 2, 2026

Last week, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle American lawsuits over how Instagram and Facebook treat children. The app will now be rebuilt around American teenagers, from a daily time limit to an overnight curfew. But none of it is coming to India, the single biggest market Meta has anywhere in the world.So every op-ed page has been asking the obvious question. If Meta can protect a teenager in California, why should one in India wait? It sounds fair. But in this episode, host Snigdha Sharma argues the question is misdirected, and also that the fix we want to bring home would slip past the Indian child who needs it most.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Alexis Spence was 11 years old when she first opened an Instagram account, and she did it behind her parents' backs. They had said no, and anyway, the app was supposed to be shut to anybody under 13. But it barely took Alexis any time to find a way around it, and soon she was on it for hours at a time, and most of it was late night and alone. Now, her family would later argue in court that whatever the app kept showing their 11-year-old daughter pushed her slowly towards starving herself, hating her body and even harming it. Things got so harrowing that ultimately the Spencers took Meta to court. And their lawsuit was the first to bring up Meta's own leaked internal research

in which its researchers admitted that they had long-known Instagram worsened body image for teenage girls. The reason that you've probably heard of the case of Alexis Spence is because she's American. In 2024, researchers interviewed 15 teenage girls here in Kolkata, India, about what Instagram did to the way they saw themselves. And what they described was a version of the same thing. The filters that quote-unquote corrected their faces, the bodies that just didn't look right according to the app. Basically, they were in the early stages of the same disorders that had put up Alexis Pence under treatment. The difference between the cases here and the ones in the US is the ending. And that gap became the most evident last week.

Nearly every US state had sued Meta together, accusing it of knowingly designing Instagram and Facebook in a way to addict children. And Meta, rather than finishing the trial last week, decided to settle and agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the course of a decade. Now, just to clarify, this money will go to the state. and what the families like the Spencers will get is the other half of the deal. The apps will be rebuilt around their children. A two-hour daily limit, the apps going dark post-12am, no drastic beauty filters, and also

like gowns being switched off. All of this is for American teenagers and there is nothing for our children here in the country that happens to be the single biggest market that Meta has in the world. So, every op-ed page since last week has naturally been asking the same obvious question. If META can protect a teenager in California, why should a teenager in India wait? And it is a fair question. But I think it is the wrong one. It is wrong about who we are asking and also wrong about who we are asking for.

Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Kent. I'm your host Nidda Sharma and I don't chase the new cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Vargyz, Heise and I will bring you one business story that's worth understanding and worth your time. Today is Thursday, the 3rd of September. The harm that Meta's own researchers documented does not politely stop at the American border. And now that the remedy exists, people asking why a child in India should be left behind on the older, harmful version of Instagram is a very reasonable question.

But the trouble is who we're pointing this question at. Because think about it. We are essentially expecting meta to choose to be decent to us, based on what, the goodness of its heart? That it should just look at what it has agreed to do in America and volunteer to do the same here? We know exactly how this goes. In fact, Indian reporters even asked the tech giant whether these protections were coming to India, and the company gave them a non-answer and pointed them to a blog post that mentioned India nowhere. Generosity, as it turns out, is a thing that companies keep for themselves.

18 billion dollars spread over the course of a decade with terms and conditions applied is Peanuts for Meta. Just for context, by the way, the company makes around $16 billion in a single quarter. Reality is that Meta changed its product when there was legal pressure. A teenager in California is protected today because state attorney generals took the company to trial and did not back down. The Indian state also has the power to do something like this. And also, it is not like India has been sitting on its hands.

We have the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, whose final rules were notified in late 2025. And it says that no company may handle the data of anybody under the age of 18 without verified consent from a parent. It also bars platforms from profiling children or serving them targeted ads. The catch is that the pot built for children does not fully take effect until 2027. And then we've also had multiple states autonomously pushed for social media bans for children. This March, Karnataka announced that it would ban social media outright for anybody under 16. Andhra Pradesh said it would do the same for under 13 and then floated pushing that up to 16. The Madras High Court and the government's own chief economic advisor have been leaning the same way towards an Australia-style wall.

So India is not short of resolve. And that resolve is aimed somewhere very specific. The data law governs the pipe running out of the app, the consent behind it, and the question of who gets to follow a child around the internet. The proposed state bans govern the door into the app and whether a child may walk in at all. What neither of them touches is the room itself. Nothing in the Data Protection Act caps screen time or sets a curfew. It says nothing about the engineered pull that keeps a teenager scrolling at 2 in the morning. A ban does not fix that either.

It just tries to keep the child outside the door and then hits the problem none of these tools has solved, which is knowing who a child is in the first place. Karnataka announced its ban with new way to enforce it. Age verification is the wall that everybody has been running into. There is an irony running under all of this. The one thing that America did was force META to rebuild the product itself. and it's the one thing that India has not even reached for. Our instinct has been to police the data around the app or to wall the child away from it.

Meta, tellingly, is comfortable with the first instinct and is afraid of the second. It will happily hand parents more dials to turn. It has also warned governments, in fact, of outright bans because a locked door outside its product costs it far more than a safety setting inside of it, which I think is the first thing that the op-ed pages get wrong. The demand for Meta to apply the changes that it is making for American children misreads what our own state chose to do with its power. It reached for a wall and for a rulebook about data rather than insist that the building itself

be made safe. And let's say that we win this argument. Meta says yes and the law forces its hand and the same fix from America arrives here. Who does it really protect? More on that in the next segment. The American limits, the two-hour cap, the midnight curfew, lift only when a parent allows it. Our own law runs on the same thing. Verified consent from a parent before a child's data can be touched.

Every version of this, whether it is imported or it is homegrown, assumes one particular person in the room, which is a parent who can work a phone and clear some kind of a check. in an urban home that parent exists and that is the child that most op-ed pages are picturing a teenager in Delhi or in Mumbai with a parent who can navigate an app store But think of a first-generation smartphone home in Tier 3 India where a teenager is the most fluent person in the house. She sets up her father's account or her mother's account. What I am saying is verified parental consent assumes a gatekeeper. But here the gatekeeper is the child themselves.

So the fix reaches the child who is comparatively safer and it slips past the one who is most exposed. Which turns the real question around. away from how we get metas fix towards something more real. What does protection look like when you cannot assume a capable adult behind the consent screen? What will safety that stays on by default look like? Something that does not wait for a parent to switch it on, or does not ask for aid checks from someone who can't even read the form. Those 15 girls in Kolkata were online and visible enough that a researcher could sit across them

and write things down about what Instagram had done to them. But there is another girl that no one sat across from in a house where no adult can reach for the settings. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of premium podcasts.

To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleagues, Niktha Sharma, and edited by Rati F.C.N.