Young people should hold decision-making authority over a portion of the money their state receives from the social media settlement. They hold knowledge, about whether a program will reach them and address what they experience as the problem, that cannot be obtained any other way, and consultation that carries no authority has rarely changed what the institutions being consulted do. A state that gives young people less than a majority of the vote should say why.

Nothing in the settlement requires this, and nothing in it prevents it. Meta pays the settling jurisdictions between $11.7 billion and $16.7 billion over ten annual installments, and each state decides how its own share is spent. Nine jurisdictions negotiated binding restrictions into their own payment instructions, which shows the language was available to anyone who asked. None of the payment instructions in the agreement contains a requirement that young people take part in deciding how the money is spent.

What the evidence establishes

Settlement money mostly does not reach the harm it was meant to address, and does not stay there, unless something requires it to. The 1998 tobacco agreement attached no condition, and the states that received more per resident went on to run weaker tobacco control programs than the states that received less. The opioid settlements generally require at least 85 percent of funds to go to abatement, and states receiving more per resident saw larger declines in overdose deaths. Neither record proves cause, and both point the same way. In its general terms, the social media agreement resembles the tobacco agreement.

Youth advisory bodies produce real benefits for the young people who serve on them. What the research has rarely examined, and rarely found, is an effect on the institutions they advise. Bodies that direct how a defined sum is spent show a different record. Michigan's youth grantmaking committees have run for more than three decades, and their members identified their own legal exclusion from nonprofit boards, testified before the legislature, and the law was changed.

Whether a program reaches a fifteen-year-old, and whether it speaks to what that fifteen-year-old experiences as the problem, are questions a fifteen-year-old is best placed to answer. Adults deciding alone tend to fund what looks to them like youth programming. Opioid settlement money paid for a mixed martial arts demonstration and a 1950s-themed sock hop. No young person had a hand in choosing either one.

The arrangement we are asking states to create

A state designates a portion of its settlement funds for this purpose. A body of young people and adults decides how that portion is spent, and young people hold 51 percent of the vote on that body. An adult fiduciary is responsible for the funds and makes the distributions, as a community foundation board does in Michigan.

No state has to grant a minor fiduciary capacity for this to work.

Members are prepared before they decide. That preparation covers the subject matter, the decision in front of them, who holds final authority over it, and the skills the work takes. An allocation decision is made over weeks, with room to deliberate and to ask questions, and those are the conditions under which adolescents from about age 16 reason at adult-like levels.