Teen agency beyond Meta's reckoning

Meta's $17.1 billion settlement highlights addictive platform design, but teen voices remain absent from debate. Research at Rutgers University reveals adolescents navigate 7 to 12 platforms daily, driven by boredom and peer dynamics. Teens aged 13-16 report short-form videos shrink attention spans. Some are pushing back through micro-frictions like deleting apps intermittently, showing metacognitive agency.

Teens are primed to learn more rapidly than at any other stage of development. Yet that power makes teens more vulnerable to negative stimuli.