In new research, Elettra Bietti compares the efficacy of the two legal avenues that have arisen to restrain social media’s ability to monopolize people’s time and attention: antitrust policy and product liability for consumer harm. Looking at the results of two recent Meta cases, she finds that product liability has proven the most capable in introducing the frictions needed to reduce social media’s addictive design.
Attention is a scarce but malleable resource. The material structures and social contexts that mediate information production and exchange—the living room, classroom, mobile phones, social media platforms, and artificial intelligence tools—can shape how our attention is directed, shared, safeguarded, consumed, quantified, and commodified. Social media companies, including Instagram, TikTok or YouTube, have a privileged power as contemporary public squares to shape how people spend their time and attention. Not only that, but social media is designed to keep people hooked. These businesses’ core goals include shrinking offline time and distracting people from their offline lives. This has led to consequences such as the loneliness crisis and democratic backsliding.
A key question today is how to slow or stop these companies from extracting and monetizing attention in ways that benefit themselves while systemically undermining people’s individual and collective flourishing. Antitrust lawyers believe that more competition and less concentration in the social media landscape can solve this problem. In a recent paper titled “The Data-Attention Imperative,” I favor imposing technical, legal and economic frictions on the ability of tech companies to extract and undermine people’s attention. In what follows, I contrast two approaches, exemplified by two recent cases concerning the social media company Meta. The first is the antitrust approach, which focuses on competitive attention markets. The second is the product liability approach, which focuses on product design and time constraints on social media use. As I argue, when it comes to protecting human attention as a valuable collective good, the latter must be preferred to the former.
The antitrust approach
“If the only tool you have is a hammer” wrote Abraham Maslow in 1966, it’s tempting “to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Antitrust lawyers believe in competition as a solution to many problems, and of many problems as capable of being solved through more competition. They think of attention as a resource negotiated and consumed in narrowly defined markets or zones of competition which need to be kept competitive. In antitrust, an attention market contains the universe of products and services competing for users’ attention that consumers view as substitutes of each other, such that if the price of an HBO subscription slightly increases, some consumers may decide to switch to HBO’s competitor Netflix.
The FTC v. Meta antitrust case illustrates how courts have examined online platform markets for attention and the limits of antitrust analysis when it comes to governing and protecting people’s attention and time. The case posed the question of Meta’s monopoly over personal social media (PSN) services and dwelled on the definition of this market, which the FTC considered Facebook and Instagram to dominate. According to the FTC’s complaint, the market for PSN services excludes specialized and interest-based sites such as LinkedIn, Stackoverflow, or Strava, as well as video-sharing sites like YouTube and mobile messaging services like WhatsApp. The court, however, interpreted trial evidence to show that TikTok and YouTube are direct competitors of Facebook and Instagram, and as such that TikTok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are part of the same relevant market. Meta accordingly lacked monopoly power in such market and would not be broken up.
At trial, experts were invited to testify on the scope of the relevant market. Meta’s experts presented evidence from time displacement field experiments, which Judge James Boasberg then relied on in his court ruling. These experiments presented user reactions to social media bans or access restrictions such as a Meta outage in 2021, a YouTube outage in 2018, and various TikTok bans or shutdowns in India and the United States. In a paid experiment, 6,000 participants were divided into a control and treatment group. The control group was paid to continue their social media use as normal, while the treatment group was paid $4 an hour to reduce Instagram and Facebook use. The experiment found that the treatment group would more easily switch to platforms like TikTok or YouTube than to services considered direct Meta competitors in PSN, like Snapchat. From these findings, the district court concluded that Meta directly competes with YouTube and TikTok, and thus that Meta isn’t a monopolist on the relevant social networking market.
The ruling has been criticized for several reasons. Most significantly for my purposes here, the decision makes clear that the antitrust lens shrinks attention down to a resource negotiated and monetized in for-profit commercial markets. The scope of the “relevant” antitrust social networking market is by definition narrow and arbitrary since in practice Meta’s social media platforms compete with a plethora of other social media products, with web browsing generally, and with really any other activity, like reading books, going to school, spending time with family, and even sleeping.
Instead of asking, as the antitrust court does in the Meta lawsuit, what products Facebook users might switch to in response to particular price or product changes, policymakers should question why adults and minors are spending so much time on digital platform products with substantial mental health consequences instead of reading, meeting with friends, and engaging in other worthy offline pursuits. Antitrust law is concerned with the quality and cost of existing social media services and with enabling more consumer choice, but it will not ensure that people can spend their time in more socially meaningful or more productive ways offline.
Since 2020, when the Meta case started, social media markets have become more competitive but the amount of time people spend online has not significantly changed. Far from favoring a better attentional diet, more competition might contribute to further social media exposure and to a saturation of people’s time and attentional resources.
The product liability approach
A more promising approach frames attention as a resource that needs protecting and safeguarding for the good of the collective, not a marketable commodity or the isolated process in an individual’s mind. Consumer protection, torts and product liability law don’t always entail a collective understanding of resources such as attention. Yet, recently, parents, school districts, and state attorneys general in the U.S. have initiated a wave of lawsuits against social media companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap, and YouTube. They accuse the companies of designing their products in ways that promote addiction and fail to mitigate collective harm to minors. While these lawsuits are resulting in imperfect and only partially successful outcomes, they get us closer to a society in which attention is viewed as an essential collective resource that must be safeguarded to promote human flourishing.
In K.G.M. v. Meta, a 19-year-old alleged design liability, negligence and other consumer law violations by several social media companies. Meta and YouTube were found liable for negligent design and a failure to warn users about potential health effects, which led to mental health issues. The court awarded the plaintiff a $6 million award in damages. In a New Mexico lawsuit, Meta was found to have violated state consumer law for prioritizing addictive design over child safety, and now has to pay $375 million in damages.
Most recently, in August 2026, Meta settled a large multi-district lawsuit in the Northern District of California, agreeing to pay at least $12 billion and up to $17 billion depending on whether other social media companies also adopt the new platform safeguards. These substantial changes to platform functionality will last for a duration between five and 10 years and include a ban for under 13-year-olds and curfews and default time limits for minors. The case alleged a number of torts and consumer protection violations, including the design of addictive features and deceptive failure to disclose risks to minors.
Not everyone is satisfied with the remedies of these cases. Certainly, these lawsuits have many limits, not least that they often come too late, after the damage has been done, and impose monetary penalties too limited to truly discipline tech actors worth trillions of dollars. They are also unsuited to fully reverting the harms social media caused to plaintiffs, namely, to addict and perniciously eat into young people’s fragile social lives, causing mental and behavioral disruption. Highlighting the limits of monetary deterrence is fair, even though $12-17 billions seems a substantial portion of Meta’s annual revenues. Highlighting the limits of remedies such as age verification is also fair: it is true that age gating could undermine minors and adults’ digital privacy, with some exceptions.
However, many commentators have gone beyond fair and constructive criticism, calling the August 2026 settlement “a win for Meta.” Among other attacks, critics have alleged that the settlement creates an opportunity for social media companies to anticompetitively collude on safety standards, since Meta openly agreed to pay more in fines if the other defendant companies also agree to the same terms. This, in turn, could represent an undesirable erosion of industry-wide standards, and an end point for reform rather than a starting point. Prominent digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation also criticized the settlement’s time and design provisions for being “imposed, top-down, on teens and anyone else who declines to submit to Meta’s age assurance process” and for assuming that all social media use “is frivolous and unserious.”
These latter criticisms are wrongheaded and tainted by the very same libertarian complacency that has led to the concentrated, surveillance-powered and addictive digital economy we face today. Most design lawsuits, including Meta’s settlement, have the potential to significantly alter the design of addictive tech products and practices in the future, and might re-align the tech environment with some measure of collective flourishing in the attention age. As I argue, it is important to understand digital autonomy as more than negative freedom, or freedom from social or state intervention. Enhancing digital autonomy requires placing friction and constraints on the power of attention extractive platform businesses to capture people’s data, attention and time and to colonize human experience for gain. While the Meta settlement and other consumer protection lawsuits may be seen as partial wins, the imposition of curfews and time use defaults is exactly the kind of friction that can, over time, contribute to helping people spend time away from tech devices, pursuing other valuable activities such as sports, reading, exploring nature, and socializing with family and friends. As I also argue (and I am not alone), taxing time spent online could further impose friction on attention platform business models and would be an important step forward.
Framing attention platform regulation in terms of friction that adds costs to the otherwise fluid and seamless operation of attention-hungry platforms might better contribute to individual and collective human flourishing than the antitrust focus on making attention markets more competitive. Unfortunately, the latter only exposes people to more extractive opportunities.
Author’s Disclosures: The author reports no conflicts of interest. You can read our disclosure policy here.
Articles represent the opinions of their writers, not necessarily those of the University of Chicago, the Booth School of Business, or its faculty.
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