Meta on Wednesday agreed to pay up to $18 billion and implement stronger child-safety measures across its products after reaching a settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories over claims that its social media platforms were endangering children.
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While the agreement still requires court approval, Meta has said it will implement a slew of changes to its apps to protect kids.
“One day, we will look back on today as the beginning of the end of the bad old days when children had unfettered access to products designed to addict them and expose them to serious mental harm,” Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes said.
The settlement funds will go toward mental health programs for kids, after-school and summer activities and digital counselors. While this settles cases brought by the states, Meta will still face several other lawsuits from school districts and individuals that are scheduled for trial in the coming months.
The company emphasized that new restrictions would only work if all social media platforms updated their designs.
“As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement,” CJ Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. “But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.”
What will change for teens on Instagram and Facebook?
- Teenagers under 18 will be limited to two hours a day on Instagram or Facebook unless a parent adjusts the settings to allow more time.
- There will be automatic overnight restrictions between midnight and 6 a.m.
- During school hours from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., push notifications will be muted by default to reduce distractions.
- Teenagers will be able to turn off “autoplay,” a feature that plays content continuously. Instead, users can tap or swipe to see the next photo or video on the app.
- Young users will now be able to turn off personalized feeds, opting out of algorithmic recommendations.
- Additionally, automatic prompts will pop up on the screen when a user is on the app for 15 consecutive minutes, with follow-up reminders appearing again after 60 minutes and 90 minutes of use.
- “Like” counts will be disabled and teens will not be able to use “extreme makeup filters.”
- Meta said it will give teenagers a new way to report harmful content, promising to respond to 90% of the reports within six hours.
- The company is also planning to roll out protections against “unwanted contact from strangers” including restricting adults from messaging or viewing teenagers’ content.
- In addition, Meta said it would update parental tools to help parents better monitor their children’s accounts.
- Meta agreed to invest more in its age-verification technology to identify users who are under 13 and not authorized to be on the app.
When do the new rules take effect?
If the settlement is approved, consumers can expect some changes to Instagram and Facebook within the next four to six months, including non-personalized feeds for teenagers and enhanced protection measures. However, certain features, such as updates to the age-verification system, may take a year to deploy.
Meta has agreed to pay 70% – roughly $12.7 billion – of the settlement over the next 10 years. It will only pay the remaining 30% if its competitors – Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube – implement similar safety measures and agree to pay states an equivalent share. This means that a large sum of the settlement remains conditional.
“This settlement is big news, but the $17 billion headline is probably the least interesting part of it,” Nora Freeman Engstrom, a legal scholar at Stanford Law School, said by email. “…What really matters is not what Meta pays; it’s what Meta does – or has to do. Meta has accepted enforceable constraints on the design and operation of its products, and the states have produced a regulatory template that they can now take to the rest of the industry.”.
These changes will apply to users in the U.S., although it is unclear whether Meta plans to implement them globally, though some countries have already taken action. In December, Australia enacted the world’s first social media ban for teenagers. It blocked those under 16 from platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X and YouTube. In June, the Australian government announced it would toughen the restrictions, administering penalties for tech companies violating the law.
Will kids be able to get around the restrictions?
Meta agreed to implement an age-verification system to detect users under 13 as well as teenagers pretending to be adults. The company was instructed to develop its own platform-wide system or hire a third-party provider to do so.
“Meta has an extraordinary ability to understand nearly everything about its users,” Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, said by email. “Applied to age assurance, Meta should be able to use the extensive signals it already collects to introduce significant friction for teens attempting to evade restrictions through alternate accounts or false ages, without requiring users to provide additional personal data.”
However, identifying underage users remains legally challenging because federal child privacy laws limit Meta’s ability to apply certain age-verification tools to children under 13.
Kint raised concerns about the company’s ability to fully enforce the policy.
“Determined teens will find workarounds, but improvements will be material as they have been in Australia,” Kint said. “The real question is whether Meta follows through on its commitment and whether there is credible oversight to ensure it does.
Why is this settlement such a big deal?
This settlement forces a tech giant to alter the core of its microtargeted, algorithmic-driven design for young users. The case set a precedent, providing a blueprint that other social media platforms may eventually be required to follow.
“This is incredibly historic and one of the biggest moments we’ve had in kids’ online safety and accountability for big tech in this movement to better protect kids online thus far, and so, in that sense, it is huge,” Haley Hinkle, the policy counsel at Fairplay says.
But Hinkle already sees improvements that could be made.
“We really, really push for defaults instead of options on things like this,” Hinkle says, addressing that users will have to opt in to at least some of the changes.
Kint is skeptical that the settlement is enough.
“It doesn’t touch the engine,” Kint said. “Screen-time limits and hiding public metrics will reduce some exposure, but they don’t address the core issue: surveillance, extensive data collection and algorithmic microtargeting of users with advertising and user-generated content optimized to maximize attention and revenue.”
