Recent court rulings have begun to chip away at the idea that social media companies are untouchable. Judges are increasingly allowing product liability claims against Meta to move forward. The courts recognize what social media platforms have long denied—these are not passive or neutral spaces akin to a community bulletin board. They are deliberately designed to maximize engagement (even attachment), and those design choices carry with them legal liability.
One might expect a company facing that kind of scrutiny to correct course by rethinking the product choices that create foreseeable harm. Not Meta.
Instead, it has continued rolling out features that carry obvious risks. Disappearing messages, for example, borrow one of Snapchat’s most problematic design choices: reducing transparency and making harmful interactions harder to trace.
That same pattern is now showing up in Instagram’s testing of a premium plan called “Instagram Plus,” which includes a feature that would allow users to view Stories anonymously. What could possibly go wrong?
We don’t have to speculate. We already know.
Social media already facilitates cyberstalking by providing constant updates on users’ activity, connections, and location. Instagram’s existing system at least provides some measure of transparency: users can see who has viewed their Stories, and this visibility creates a minimal deterrent effect.
Remove that, and the dynamic changes entirely. With anonymous viewing, someone can monitor another person’s activity continuously without detection.
Meta positions this feature as a privacy upgrade, but it is entirely foreseeable that bad actors and those already inclined to misuse the platform might exploit this new feature. It predictably lowers the barrier to stalking, and it does so in an environment heavily populated by young users.
Meta has long argued that it is not responsible for how people use its platforms, but that argument doesn’t hold water. Design features shape behavior. Anonymous viewing makes covert surveillance easier. Disappearing messages make harmful exchanges easier to conceal. These are not unintended side effects. They are foreseeable outcomes.
This is exactly the kind of product-design risk the Senate version of the Kids Online Safety Act’s (KOSA) “duty of care” provision is meant to address. It would require social media platforms to exercise reasonable care in the design and operation of their products to prevent and mitigate specific harms to minors.
That is also why Meta’s lobbying against duty of care matters. The company has been pushing relentlessly to remove that standard from children’s online safety bills. And now, according to news reports, it is trying to negotiate a deal with Congressional leaders to drop its opposition to KOSA in exchange for immunity from lawsuits.
Courts are beginning to say that companies may be held accountable for harmful design. Meta, meanwhile, is deploying its lobbyists on Capitol Hill to limit that accountability while simultaneously introducing design features that increase risk.
In other words, the company is not stepping back. It is positioning itself.
The courts may be beginning to close the gap between innovation and accountability. The question is whether policymakers will allow that gap to reopen through negotiated immunity.
Because if these latest features tell us anything, it is this: Meta did not learn its lesson. It merely changed its strategy.
