Earlier this month, a trial in a California federal court began that pitted Meta against state attorneys general. They had sued the social-media giant, accusing it of designing features to get children addicted to Instagram and Facebook.
Yesterday there was a major development: a settlement that will see Meta paying up to $18bn to the states over the next 10 years “to fund youth online safety initiatives, among other state priorities”.
Meta has also promised to introduce a swathe of new features governing under-18s’ use of Instagram and Facebook, including “a default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission” across both platforms.
Both apps will be blocked for these users between midnight and 6am; notifications will be muted by default during school hours; and teenagers will be able to choose “a non-algorithmic feed” that Meta will remind them of regularly.
But let’s talk about the “up to $18bn” part of the settlement. Actually, the states are only guaranteed to get $12.7bn of that money. The other $5.3bn is locked behind two conditions agreed in the settlement:
“1. YouTube and TikTok implement a one-hour Daily Limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures. 2. YouTube and TikTok each pay an amount matching the 30% figure, with half of the remaining funds tied to YouTube’s payment and half tied to TikTok’s.”
52 attorneys general have signed up to the settlement, which cuts off a trial that was expected to see Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg among the executives taking the stand.
YouTube and TikTok have yet to comment on the news, but the attorneys general have (unsurprisingly) hailed it as a triumph. “a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” as California AG Rob Bonta put it.
Digital rights groups and media are taking… a different view however.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) criticised it for restricting teenagers’ free speech rights, but also attacked the way it “embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages”.
Techdirt gave the settlement a thorough kicking too: “Age assurance is a privacy nightmare. Enshrining it as the industry standard means the end of meaningful online anonymity, and it ‘forces’ Meta to collect more data about all of us — including adults — while handing the states a pipeline to that data for whatever else they decide it’s useful form,” it claimed.
“Meta just cut a deal to put itself in charge of how social media works going forward,” it continued. “Meta bought itself a moat. The AGs bought themselves headlines that will be useful next election season. And every teenager in the country was just automatically enrolled in an untested experiment.”
‘What does this mean for the music industry?’ has understandably not been a priority for coverage of the settlement so far, but that’s very much Music Ally’s wheelhouse.
Clearly in the US the changes agreed by Meta may have a huge impact on music marketing and how artists connect with fans – especially if YouTube and TikTok adopt them too. And even more so if they are rolled out elsewhere in the world, either voluntarily by the platforms or at the behest of regulators taking their cues from the US settlement.
Our recent Sandbox Guide ‘Embracing the youth social media bans‘ explored what social media bans for young people could mean for bands, brands and fans – subscribers can read it in full here.
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