Human Development

Jul 20, 2026 Kelly Stonelake

As the European Union considers how to protect and empower young people in a digital world, it must resist the urge only to enact a ban on social media for young people. A more effective strategy would force tech companies to remove addictive features by holding them to product-liability standards—as with most other industries.

SEATTLE—When I joined Facebook in 2009, I believed in the mission that founder Mark Zuckerberg espoused: to connect and empower people around the world. We all know how that turned out. Meta, now the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is focused on generating as much engagement as possible, which has led to platforms that addict, enrage, misinform, and polarize users.