Apple and Meta intensify their dispute over who is responsible for protecting children

• Meta suggested that Apple should take responsibility for age verification on the App Store.

• This is convenient for Meta, but Apple has lobbied hard to reverse any regulations that might enforce this.

• In the end, parents and children lose.

Meta has a problem. Everyone, their mom and the state attorney general, are furious with them for their role in contributing to the teen mental health crisis.

Last November, Meta’s global security chief, Antigone Davis, published a blog post calling on the government to regulate children and teens’ access to Instagram and other social media. She suggested that Apple and Google take control of age screening and parental consent through their app stores. She wrote:

It seems like Meta is just trying to get out of having to clean up her own mess.

But Meta is right: I would do it would be much easier for Apple and Google to implement age control at the app store level than leaving this task to each app individually.

According to a report this week in The Wall Street Journal, Apple isn’t inclined to consider the idea at all. When state lawmakers in Louisiana were considering a bill that would have made app stores responsible for age verification, Apple sent a team of lobbyists to help shut it down. It worked — that part of the bill was withdrawn.

It’s a new twist in the quiet feud between Meta and Apple. Meta has a few complaints about Apple: Apple has hurt its advertising business with its “ask an app not to track” feature; its App Store charges a hefty fee of up to 30% for some in-app purchases; and, worst of all, Apple has gotten away with a lax, holier-than-thou approach to privacy.

You can imagine why Apple isn’t thrilled about its plan to take responsibility for age restrictions on all social media apps. Apple doesn’t want to deal with age verification because it’s a privacy nightmare. And it probably doesn’t want to clean up the mess of Meta and TikTok. Plus, Apple already has parental controls and age ratings in the App Store that allow parents to block apps rated above a certain age.

So Apple and Meta are at a standstill.

Everyone seems to agree that there’s a big problem with young people and social media, but there’s no clear, obvious solution. Age verification isn’t ideal (I certainly don’t want to upload my driver’s license to use Instagram), and simply keeping kids under 13 (or 15!) off these apps doesn’t solve the thorny issues of how unhappy young people become once they’re on social media.

Meanwhile, individual states are creating piecemeal laws regarding social media and teens. New York passed a law this summer banning “addictive” algorithms in young users’ news feeds. Other states, including California, Arkansas and Utah, have also tried to pass their own laws regulating social media for teens, though they have faced First Amendment scrutiny in the courts.

The best hope for immediate policy change, it seems to me, is for individual schools to ban cell phones from the classroom. That would probably make teachers happy and make kids pay more attention, but that’s only part of the bigger problem.

Both Meta and Apple could do more to address the kids-and-phones issue — and so could the government. For now, parents are left to deal with the problems alone.

Read the original article on Business Insider