What’s in Meta’s Teen Social Media Settlement—and What Hinges on Its Rivals | #childpredator | #onlinepredator | #sextrafficing

Last Tuesday, Meta lawyers entered a courtroom in Oakland, California to face a judge and jury over alleged harms to children in a bellwether trial brought by state attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The trial was expected to last through October.

But on Wednesday, less than ten days after the trial began, Meta reached a landmark settlement with 52 attorneys general from US states, territories, and the District of Columbia, agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion while also making changes to its platforms for teen users, including restrictions on late-night access and limits on daily time spent on its apps.

Meta denied the allegations and admitted no wrongdoing. Still, many are calling it social media’s ‘Big Tobacco’ moment.

“The message to the tech industry is clear: build child safety in, or courts and legislatures will make you,” said James Steyer, founder and chief executive of Common Sense Media, in a statement. “Between devastating evidence that was emerging in the trial and pending legislation in California, Mark Zuckerberg saw the hammer coming down. Meta’s decision to settle is proof that the prospect of paying real money works.”

Others are less certain it will necessarily result in meaningful change.

“Today’s announced settlement is a significant milestone in the battle to hold Meta responsible for providing safe products, but it should not be interpreted as an ‘all clear’ sign by parents and public officials,” said Arturo Béjar, a former Meta child safety leader who testified at the trial last week. “The settlement addresses but does not solve very significant problems which remain.”

Such problems include certain problematic design features that are not addressed, according to Jennifer King, the privacy and data policy fellow at the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. These include infinite scroll.

“Ultimately, Instagram and Facebook are products intended for use by adults that were not designed with anyone’s​ health and safety in mind, but instead optimized for maximum engagement and profitability,” said King.

The settlement also contains a catch: Roughly ~$5 billion of the ~$17 billion settlement amount touted in headlines is contingent on Meta’s competitors—TikTok, YouTube and Snap—being bound to “substantively equivalent obligations” on restrictions for teen users and taking on comparable monetary obligations, according to the settlement. If these rivals are locked into similar rules, then under the settlement Meta will extend the block on night access and tighten the daily time cap, and will owe additional contingent payments to the states.

What’s in the settlement?

The settlement consists of $12 billion in guaranteed payments that can be used by the states to fund a variety of possible initiatives, such as after-school and summer programs, digital wellness and youth mental health programs, and other remedies. It requires Meta to make various changes to its products, including nighttime limits on teen access and notifications; options for teens to switch to a non-personalized, chronological feed; hiding like and reaction counts for teens by default; barring certain “cosmetic procedure” filters; expanded parental tools; and “productive pause” prompts aimed at curbing excessive use.

The settlement also requires that Meta implement an “age assurance” framework. Within a year, Meta is required to distinguish under-13, teen, and adult users and to meet certain thresholds for accuracy.

“Certainly this will be a test of age estimation and verification features: how well they perform, how to adjudicate misclassifications, and, perhaps, how effective they are,” noted King.

These changes are expected to create safer and more intentional experiences for young people on Meta’s apps, according to Mick Tobin, co-founder and advocacy director of youth advocacy nonprofit Young People’s Alliance. “Giving teens the ability to turn off algorithmic feeds, muting disruptive notifications, and hiding like counts will help combat compulsive use and the constant social comparison that fuels anxiety and depression,” he said. “These are the design protections young people have demanded for years.”

Yet some see the settlement as putting too much onus on parental supervision.

“The settlement puts too much emphasis on parental controls, rather than confronting the intentional design choices upstream, including default algorithms designed to keep kids from leaving the platforms,” said Meetali Jain, executive director of Tech Justice Law, a litigation and advocacy organization. “We shouldn’t have to rely on parents policing their kids. Companies should be designing products that are safe from the onset.”

The settlement resolves the claims by the state attorneys general, but leaves claims by other plaintiffs in the sprawling multidistrict litigation intact, including those by individuals and school districts.

Accountability and monitoring

In a substantial section on “Accountability,” the settlement requires that a “State Committee” made up of a “bipartisan group of no more than 6 Attorney General offices” and Meta identify a “mutually approved qualified, independent third-party auditor” that would have access to the company’s personnel, systems, and “raw data; aggregated data; information; internal documents and communications” necessary to evaluate its implementation of the relief terms. The auditor can directly report any concerns to the State Committee, and if it identifies a material weakness, Meta has to develop a corrective-action plan, though the auditor’s recommendations are otherwise “non-binding.”

“Meta is going to face ongoing monitoring under an independent auditor to ensure that the protections it is required to provide under this settlement agreement are actually effective,” said Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, an organization that works to protect kids from Big Tech. “By asking the court to approve these design protections, Meta admits what we have long known, which is that their platform design can be regulated by law enforcers.”

“Having an independent party verify the statements of Meta is important,” said Jeff Allen, cofounder and chief research officer at the nonprofit Integrity Institute. “However, it seems that the audit reports will have to be treated as confidential by the states. This means that the public at large will be unlikely to see the actual data. Parents won’t be able to decide for themselves if, for example, the platform is as safe as individual parents would like it to be with regards to putting their child in contact with malicious actors.”

What is necessary, said Béjar, are “effectiveness obligations” that produce substantially different results than the past interventions Meta has rolled out. “The level of harm … cannot be what Meta says it is,” he said. “It must be independently measured and capture the harm that young people experience, not what Meta says they do.”

Phase II and ‘Industry-Wide Adoption’

Among the novel aspects of the settlement are its provisions for what it terms “Industry-Wide Adoption” of its obligations. If TikTok, YouTube, and Snap are bound to equivalent obligations, then the settlement says Meta must make additional payments and that it will implement additional “Contingent Time Management” measures, increasing the restrictions on night usage of its apps and tightening the daily usage limitations.

There are three routes for other platforms to “adopt” the obligations stipulated under the settlement. The condition can be met if the other firms enter into a settlement, consent decree, or other commitment that is substantially similar to the Meta settlement; if they become subject to state or federal laws or regulations that impose equivalent obligations, or if they enter into “verified” voluntary compliance.

If another industry player settles with another state “for comparable claims” that are “on terms more favorable,” then the settling state would adjust its arrangement so Meta gets the same treatment. If Meta agrees to any stricter terms with any of the states, then all of the states get the same terms within 30 days.

The settlement also contemplates what happens if a new platform emerges that changes the competitive landscape. Such a new market entrant could change the calculus and cause the condition of “industry wide adoption” to collapse. A new app would qualify if it is functionally similar to Meta, YouTube, Snap, and TikTok applications, has at least 5 million teen users, and entices users to spend at least 30 minutes daily, for a period of four consecutive months.

“The settlement provides a clear off-ramp for both Google and TikTok from potential future litigation filed against them by state attorneys general,” said Clay Calvert, a nonresident senior fellow in technology policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “Whether they choose to take it, however, is another matter. They may not agree to the feature and design changes that Meta was amenable to, or they may object to the approximately $5.3 billion price tag. That’s ultimately a business decision those companies will need to make for themselves.”

Within hours after the settlement news was out, Meta published an open letter to YouTube and TikTok, urging its competitors to join in making these platforms safe for teens. “We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” the letter said. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers—TikTok and YouTube—to put the same measures in place.”

Kelly Stonelake, a former Meta employee of 15 years who turned whistleblower and became an advocate for child online safety, said the provisions around industry adoption could turn the settlement into leverage for Meta against its competitors.

“If it works, this stops being just a Meta settlement and starts becoming something closer to a national baseline for how social media platforms treat children,” added Stonelake.

Fairplay’s Hinkle cautioned against giving Meta too much credit for its overture.

“Meta could try to spin this as some kind of industry leadership, but the reality is that it has had all the resources in the world to better protect children from the start,” said Hinkle.

The settlement makes it harder for other platforms to argue that more stringent safety measures can’t be implemented, experts told Tech Policy Press. But there is something almost surreal about Meta positioning itself as the company calling on the rest of the industry to embrace these protections, according to Stonelake.

“For years, the industry argument has largely been that companies should be trusted to develop safety measures themselves,” she said. “Now Meta is effectively saying that voluntary action by one company is insufficient and that an industry-wide standard is necessary. On that point, I agree with them. I just think it is worth asking why it took a courtroom to get Meta there.”

According to Stanford’s King, the settlement could also have implications beyond social media.

“It puts all of the AI developers on notice that they’re not going to have 5-7 years to drag out their kid/teen strategy,” said King. “They have to be ready now.”