September 9, 2026
By Clare Melford
The $18 billion settlement agreed by Meta on August 25th in a case brought in California with 48 state attorneys-general and others is a small but welcome start, not because of the money – which is trivial compared with Meta’s profits – but because the firm has at last pledged to introduce controls over how and when children use its platforms and is pressuring the other two dominant firms in this business, Alphabet and TikTok, to do the same. Yet it is only a start because the real problem goes far beyond the absence of controls on children’s use. It lies in the publishing engine-room of these and other platforms: their algorithms.
Look at the wider picture. Trust in news continues to fall. Disinformation spreads with extraordinary speed. AI is changing how we search for information and increasingly how we consume it. Traditional journalism is under severe economic pressure, while concerns about political polarisation and online toxicity show little sign of fading.
These developments are usually discussed as separate problems, each requiring its own solution like fact checking or increased labelling. All these efforts are important, but they share a common assumption: that improving the information ecosystem starts with improving the information itself. This, alas, is to look at the problem from the wrong end.
In the internet age this focus on the information would be equivalent to telling every household to boil its drinking water to deal with the unhealthy stuff coming out of their pipes. The defining feature of today's information ecosystem isn't the content we produce. It's the systems that determine what billions of people actually see.
If we want to understand why the information ecosystem looks the way it does—or how it might be improved—we need to spend less time thinking about information in isolation and more time thinking about the algorithms that mediate our relationship with it. And we need to give the platforms that design and operate these algorithms the same sort of legal responsibilities that we have for decades given publishers. The platforms do not produce the content, but like a publisher they decide what content you see and how it is distributed and amplified.
The average person spends almost 7 hours a day on an internet-connected device vs 5 hours on radio, print and TV. As the eyeballs move online so do the advertising dollars which pay for the consumer internet, an annual $700+ billion online vs $200+billion for other media.
Those 7 hours are being spent disproportionately on the products of just 3 companies: Alphabet, Meta, and TikTok. About 3.8 hours per day is spent on their respective platforms of YouTube, Instagram and Tiktok.
What those eyeballs are doing in those hours has changed. We used to talk about “browsing the web”. We were the active participants in the experience. We searched for things in a huge library. But now by some measures, 70% of those hours spent on social media count as passive consumption rather than the making of intentional choices. People are just seeing what the platforms feed to them. These curated algorithms are known as UpNext on Youtube and For You on TikTok. Meta does not publish figures for their Facebook and Instagram algorithms.
In the past, news publishers, think tanks and policy circles used to be able to argue that this flow of information was somehow separate from “The News”, which was still primarily consumed in a traditional way on TV and in print. No longer. In the United States, 54% of people now access news through social media. The 2026 edition of the “Digital News Report” from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in Oxford revealed that in the 48 countries worldwide that they survey, for the first time social media and video networks have overtaken TV and “owned websites” (which means ones run by publishers) as the most popular source of news.
This represents one of the most profound changes in the history of media. Editors have not disappeared. They have been replaced by machine learning systems optimising billions of personalised recommendations every day to keep us hooked and show us adverts. Most of these systems are under the ultimate control of just 3 companies, none of whom have a Public Service Mandate.
So if we want to improve the information ecosystem, we must stop complaining about the content within it, and start applying standards to the algorithms that curate it for us. Setting controls over how and when children access the social media platforms are useful but they do not address the real issue both for children and adults: that of how the flow of information and news is determined, and in particular how the algorithms favour content that is shocking, frightening or emotional, because doing so is profitable.
Crucially, applying standards to algorithms is not akin to censorship. It will not seek to determine what content is created but rather the means by which it is distributed and amplified. This can be done by governments setting requirements for algorithmic transparency; independent audits and content assessments; requiring users to be given a genuine means by which they can choose how their feeds are ranked, and the ability to move their accounts between platforms. Let’s stop telling people to boil their tap water, and instead tell the water companies to put safer water into the pipes.
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Photo by William Warby