A two-hour daily cap and a midnight lockout are landing for under-18s only, as part of Meta's $18 billion settlement. Here's the case for helping yourself to the same rules, whether Meta makes you or not.
If you've felt like the platforms have been rearranging themselves around younger users for years while the rest of us keep scrolling exactly as before, that's about to change, at least for anyone under 18. On 26 August, Meta agreed to pay roughly $18 billion to settle a sweeping multistate lawsuit accusing the company of designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to kids. The settlement's actual mechanics are the interesting part: a two-hour daily cap on Instagram and Facebook combined that teens can't turn off without a parent's permission, likes and reactions hidden by default on their own posts and everyone else's, a midnight-to-6am blackout on Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels, and notifications muted from 8am to 3pm on school days.
I've read through the coverage a few times now, and the part that keeps catching me isn't the size of the payout. It's that "hide your like count," the single most-quoted feature of this whole deal, is something adults have been able to switch on for ourselves since 2021. Most of these changes are things we can already build for ourselves, one way or another. We just don't.
What Meta actually agreed to
The headline number is $18 billion, but only 70% of it, about $12.7 billion, is guaranteed. The remaining $5.3 billion is conditional on whether TikTok and YouTube adopt similar limits of their own, which tells you this was never meant to be a Meta-only fix. One former Meta engineer put the two-hour cap this way to Fortune: rationing "two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day." A strange comparison to hear about an app most of us open before we've had breakfast.
The features themselves aren't new inventions. Instagram first tested hiding like counts back in 2019 and rolled the option out globally in 2021, for everyone, not just teens. It has been sitting in the settings menu this whole time. What's changed is that it's no longer optional for under-18s. For the rest of us, it still is.
I've spent years chasing that number
I'm not writing this from above it. I've watched a like count climb in real time and felt my whole mood shift with it. I've reposted something at a "better" time because the first version didn't land fast enough. I've had good weeks made smaller by one flat post I couldn't stop refreshing. That's just what building a career on these platforms has looked like for most of the last decade, for me and for pretty much every creator I know.
Meta's own internal research, surfaced in 2021 through the Wall Street Journal's "Facebook Files", found that Instagram made body image issues worse for one in three teen girls and left one in five teens feeling worse about themselves. Reading that felt like someone finally writing down what a lot of us already knew from the inside, just at a scale too big to keep ignoring.
Hide your like count. You don't need a lawsuit to do it.
You don't have to wait for Meta, or a regulator, or your platform of choice to decide you deserve a boundary. You can hide your like count on Instagram right now, in under a minute, from the same settings menu teens are about to be defaulted into. You can turn on Screen Time limits on your phone today, no settlement required. You can mute notifications during the hours you want to be present for your life instead.
None of that is a new idea. What's new is an entire generation of teenagers getting these defaults built in from the start, while adults who built careers, communities and small businesses on the same apps are still expected to white-knuckle their way through unlimited scroll and visible metrics because, technically, we chose this job. Choosing the work doesn't mean the metrics stopped costing us anything.
What actually changes when you stop counting
I wrote a while back about treating yourself less like a content account and more like a small media company, and this is the other half of that thinking. An owned audience, a newsletter, a community that isn't rented from an algorithm, none of it works if you're still measuring your worth by a number that platform can change the rules on overnight. Hiding your own like count doesn't mean you stop caring about your work reaching people. It means you stop outsourcing how you feel about that work to a figure sitting under your last post.
That might look like turning off like visibility for a month and noticing what happens: the anxiety easing, sure, but also whether you can still tell which posts worked without the number confirming it for you. If you're building a personal brand on a platform like TikTok, the same instinct applies. I've written before about what authentic engagement looks like when you're not chasing a visible scoreboard. And if content planning is part of what's driving the compulsive checking, it's worth revisiting how you structure your calendar so posting doesn't mean refreshing on repeat.
The takeaway
Meta didn't build these guardrails because it cared more about wellbeing than growth. It built them because a coalition of states made the cost of not doing so higher than the cost of doing it, and even then, more than a quarter of the deal is riding on competitors following suit. That's worth sitting with. But the tools it's now mandating for teenagers have been sitting in your settings the whole time: free, optional, and, from where I sit, barely touched by the adults who arguably need them just as much.
You don't need an $18 billion settlement to hide your own like count. You just need to do it.
What would you notice first if you turned yours off? I'd love to know, drop it in the comments below. And if this kind of thinking is useful to you, I go deeper on building a creative life that isn't run by an algorithm's mood in Join the Muse, my newsletter through Kit. You can subscribe below.