On Wednesday, Meta agreed to a record $17 billion settlement with nearly every US state over claims that its social-media platforms were deliberately designed to addict children and teenagers. But the enormous financial payout is surprisingly less consequential than another part of the agreement: For the first time, Meta is being forced to build meaningful barriers between children and the products it has spent years carefully designing to keep them online.

The changes are significant. Accounts belonging to users under 18 will face “productive pauses” that interrupt prolonged scrolling, restrictions at night and during school hours, stronger parental controls and limits on social-comparison features such as beauty filters and visible like counts. These changes undercut these companies’ built-in features designed to make these platforms so difficult for children to put down in the first place.

It’s about time.

For years, the debate over children and social media has been in a standoff. Tech companies have pretended the entire solution is better parenting, while many parents bought a $1,000 smartphone for their 12-year-olds, let them download Instagram and then threw up their hands, acting like the fact that kids spend six hours a day scrolling is an act of God.

As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

Parents remain responsible for what they put into their children’s hands. Meta did not sneak into anyone’s house and leave an iPhone on a child’s nightstand, nor does Instagram require parents to permit their 13-year-olds to open accounts. 

But once parents do allow their children and teenagers onto these platforms — and millions have and will — there is no reason the product itself should be engineered to make their job harder.

Writing for The Free Press in December, Maya Sulkin and Frannie Block compared the lawsuits against social-media companies to the litigation that eventually transformed Big Tobacco. The states’ argument, they explained, was not merely that children used Meta and YouTube too much, but that the companies knew their products were addictive, sought to maximize that addiction and possessed internal research demonstrating potential harms.

The tobacco analogy is useful, but only up to a point. Parents are still responsible for keeping cigarettes away from their children, just as they are responsible for deciding if, when and how their children own a smartphone. But we also decided decades ago that parental responsibility did not give cigarette companies carte blanche to market addictive products to minors and then shrug when children became addicted; the same principle should apply here.

A parent should not expect Meta to parent their child, but they should be able to expect that Meta isn’t employing armies of engineers to figure out how to defeat the limits they are trying to impose.

Robby Starbuck, a frequent critic of Big Tech, was right to give Meta credit after the settlement, writing that, while the industry deserves criticism when it gets things wrong, “It’s equally important to point out when they’re getting it right.” He called the changes an attempt at “meaningful, industry wide change” and urged TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube to follow.

They should.

John Cusey, executive director of the Institute of Families and Technology, was more cautious, telling The Post that the agreement was “a huge step in the right direction” after years in which parents have been “at an impossible disadvantage” against addictive technology. But he also pointed to the settlement’s substantial limitations: Meta admits no wrongdoing, the agreement lasts only 10 years, and it does not reach messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Messenger or the rapidly expanding worlds of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and gaming.

Instagram is far from the only — or even necessarily the greatest — digital threat children encounter.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who helped spearhead the litigation, told The Post that his office is already looking beyond traditional social media. Having spent his career in law enforcement, Coleman said the job is to “go to where the threats are,” calling the fight to make Big Tech safer for children “the opioid battle of my time in office.”

That includes platforms that look nothing like Instagram. Coleman pointed specifically to Roblox, where the concern is not primarily an algorithm serving a teenager an endless stream of damaging content but predators using a gaming platform to gain access to children. Different technology presents different dangers, but the principle is the same: Companies that make enormous sums from children’s attention should bear some responsibility for protecting the kids they are monetizing.

None of this gives parents permission to throw up their hands, but these new protections make it easier for parents to do what they should have been doing all along. A night-time lockout from Meta doesn’t prevent a parent from collecting the phone before bed. A two-hour limit doesn’t mean a 13-year-old is entitled to two hours of Instagram. 

The settlement doesn’t replace parental judgment, but it does give parents reinforcements and acts as another layer of protection.

For too long, families have been fighting on enemy territory against companies with extraordinary expertise and financial incentives to design products that keep their children watching, clicking and scrolling. 

Parents should be expected to parent, but now at least one company making billions from their children have finally agreed to stop making that job harder.