When Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, settled a lawsuit a few weeks ago, the tech giant agreed to pay more that $17 billion to a collection of 47 states, including Kansas. Over the next 10 years, Kansas will receive an estimated $134 million to address the damages of social media among teens.

The sensible goal for that money is clear: Prevent the next generation of Kansans from joining social media at all. 

The middle schoolers on Instagram. The tweens on Snapchat. The teens on TikTok. The kids on YouTube.

Prevention is an ambitious goal that won’t happen by accident. It will demand ruthless coordination and execution.

Like an orchestrated military attack or political campaign, a 10-year barrage should swamp Kansans in messages about social media, ensuring that teens don’t have their first two decades defined by heart-shaped likes and the endless scroll, by extreme makeover filters and social media addiction.

Using the most ruthlessly effective practices from advertising, public relations and psychology, we can shift thinking among the youngest Kansans and their parents. Imagine today’s 4-year-olds growing up to understand social media in a different way: with realism.

It’s tempting to compare this first social media settlement to the landmark payoff from tobacco companies to states. In 1998, cigarette manufacturers began direct payments to states. The so-called Master Settlement Agreement has provided about $50 million per year to Kansas over the last 25 years, according to the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund.

Since the settlement, overall smoking rates and teen smoking rates have plummeted in Kansas and across the country. 

That, however, doesn’t mean that Kansas has used the settlement money in a targeted way. Reports from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids show that Kansas spends a small fraction from the tobacco settlement on smoking cessation programs.

During last fiscal year, the nonprofit reported that Kansas spent only 1.6% of the year’s settlement money on tobacco prevention ($2.3 million of $140.9 million). That amount lags far behind the percentage that the Centers for Disease Control recommends.

If we hope to make improvements with young people and social media, Kansas must be far more aggressive with settlement funds from Meta and any other tech companies that eventually settle (all eyes on you, TikTok, Snapchat and Google). 

Smoking rates didn’t just fall because of anti-cigarette commercials and public pressure campaigns on teens. Many factors changed our collective attitudes about tobacco: health warnings on cigarette packs, bans on smoking in public, higher costs for cigarettes, raising the minimum age for tobacco sales, restricting tobacco advertising and more. Being ushered out of your favorite restaurant for smoking will change your tobacco use pretty quickly.

Efforts to shift social media use likely won’t have the same significant parallel reforms. Meta agreed to some changes to its apps, including limiting teens’ browsing time and eliminating certain features, such as the “like” button. These reforms are at once commendable and minuscule. Changing how young people use technology will not be accomplished by changes that technology companies implement voluntarily, even to settle a lawsuit. 

To change how young Kansans interact with social media means changing parents’ minds and behavior. We parents (yes, me included) hand our kids smartphones largely unlocked to social media. In many Kansas homes with kids younger than 16, an iPhone gift at Christmas or the iPad birthday present both come with unlimited data plans.

To return to the comparison with tobacco, we parents might as well be buying cartons of cigarettes from the convenience store and standing at the front door with a lighter as our kids slouch out the door for the middle school dance, casually taking a drag and stuffing the rest of the pack into their pockets. We are their supply.

At the time of the tobacco settlement in the late 1990s, American parents weren’t reckless enough to hand packs of Marlboro Reds to their 10-year-old. They understood and acted on the dangers, even the parents who smoked themselves. 

We are doing the equivalent now with cellphones. 

Parents must be convinced that social media is fundamentally dangerous. After all, 12-year-old Sydney cannot buy her own cellphone and cellphone plan. Parents control access.

Ideally, state legislators would have long ago spent public money on campaigns to redefine social media in the minds of both parents and teens. States such as Kansas could have passed more regulations than simply banning cell phones in K-12 schools. It would have also helped for those laws to be more meaningful and exist before 2026.

Although this isn’t going to happen, the most useful way to spend millions of dollars in Kansas might be informing state legislators about the pitfalls of social media. Imagine robust state laws that penalize social media companies from doing anything that they know will create addictive behavior in any user, from children up to adults. 

Or, perhaps an embargo on the state’s universities partnering with any social media company that doesn’t comply with a list of wellness standards. If we can learn anything from reforming tobacco use in America, it’s the power of government restrictions to create norms. 

Another option would be to treat social media addiction as such: an addiction that demands treatment for each individual. Academic studies reveal effective interventions for compulsive use of social media. These range from mindfulness techniques to hypnosis to residential treatment programs. 

Even $10 million or $20 million each year could never provide such services to every Kansan who likely needs them. It’s an indication of how paltry the Meta settlement is in context — plus how widespread and problematic social media use is.  

What option remains? A focused campaign to reframe social media as poisonous and invasive — especially to the lives of young people. Describing apps this way might strike you as an overreaction, but half-measures won’t produce results. 

Parents need to see apps as harmful. Children need to see them as a long-term health risk. When I attended high school and college, this was precisely what anti-tobacco messaging told my parents and me. Along with many others from my generation, we believed it and reacted — because we saw the product as deadly and its marketing as deceptive. 

Producing such a change in public sentiment demands every dollar from the Meta settlement and any others that follow. The settlement should not fund any other program or create political pet projects. Every dollar should be aimed at reducing the use of social media among young Kansans. 

Some politicians will likely argue that the money could be spread among many initiatives — not just combatting social media. This is naive. Remember that social media companies run their own advertising campaigns to encourage us to use them over competitors. 

Meta, for instance, spends about $2 billion each year on advertising its products, according to its SEC filings. That is more per year — yes, more! — than what it will pay out to states over the next 10 years as part of the settlement. There’s no guarantee that the company won’t ramp up spending to promote itself in the future. 

Even funded by 100% of the settlement dollars, our social media problem might hold steady at best, given Meta’s own campaigns.

Two paths present themselves to us as Kansans. Down one road, we fritter away the Meta settlement over the next 10 years on a buffet of programs that are feckless and disparate, creating little to no influence on social media use among young people. 

The other road defines our state as a bold leader, truth-teller and ardent reformer of social media. Our next generation of Kansans, when they travel to neighboring states, appreciates that they understand the risks of social media better than young people from other states, such as their roommates at college roommates or their friends at work. 

Our reality will hinge, at least in part, on how ruthlessly and strategically we spend Meta’s money. 

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.