Meta commits to make platforms less harmful, but questions remain over implementation
Meta has reached a settlement to resolve a high-stakes court case that alleged the social media giant designed a deliberately addictive product and targeted it at children.
As part of the settlement, Meta has agreed to pay over $17bn in penalties, though it has denied any wrongdoing. It has also agreed to make substantial changes to how its platforms operate. These include:
- Strengthening age verification tools such that, subject to independent testing, they maintain a false positive rate no higher than 10% for users aged 16-17 or 3% for users aged 13-15.
- Limiting teens’ access to its platforms to two hours per day.
- Disallowing teens from accessing its platforms from midnight to 6:00 AM.
- Blocking notifications between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM and during school hours.
- Concealing like counts for minors.
- Interrupting infinite scrolling after 15 minutes of continuous use by teens.
- Banning beauty filters.
- Allowing users to deactive personalised feeds.
An independent auditor will be appointed to test and report on Meta’s compliance with the settlement. It is unclear who the auditor will be, what powers they will have, the degree of access they will have, and whether advertisers, researchers, or policymakers will also be granted access to its findings.
The settlement was made with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and other US territories. It effectively ends an ongoing federal trial led by attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, who were seeking $200bn in damages.
Additional lawsuits from individuals and school districts are still slated to go to trial over the coming months, however.
Meta will pay the settlement in annual instalments over a decade, with participating states receiving 70% ($12.7bn) during that time. The remaining 30% will be released if two specific conditions are met: YouTube and TikTok implement similar changes to their own platform design, and they each pay an amount collectively matching the 30% figure.
California’s attorney general Rob Bonta, one of the lead prosecutors on the case, commented that the settlement “will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of difference for children and their families.” Meta, he added, “has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months.”
However, The Guardian reports the prosecutors’ star witness and former Facebook engineer Arturo Béjar has criticised the outcome, arguing the concessions made by Meta do not go far enough. “The limitations that are in the agreement are the equivalent of saying: ‘Well you can smoke as many cigarettes as you can in two hours a day,'” he said. “It doesn’t make the cigarettes any safer.”
During the trial, the day before the settlement was reached, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri acknowledged in testimony that just 1.8% of teens had signed up for Meta’s much-touted Take a Break feature, meant to encourage teens to close its apps after scrolling for a while. The figure had not been disclosed previously.
Meta executives have likewise touted its Teen Accounts feature as being “widely used” and effective, despite research from teen online safety charity the Molly Rose Foundation finding that less than one in five Teen Accounts are fully functional, with some features not even existing.
In a blog post, a spokesperson for Meta said the settlement builds “on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens”, further promoted its Teen Accounts feature, and said it is an “absolute imperative” that teens have a “safe and productive experience” on its platforms.
Meta also released an open letter explicitly calling upon TikTok and YouTube to make similar changes to its platform design, namely a two-hour daily time limit, turning off access to apps at night, turning off notifications during school hours, instituting clear prompts and notifications to teens every 15 minutes of continuous screen time, and creating new parental supervision controls.
“We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” the Meta spokesperson said. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.”
Rowan Ferguson, the Molly Rose Foundation’s senior policy and public affairs manager, commented: “Nearly a decade ago, Molly Russell tragically lost her life due to the harms that Meta and other tech giants have repeatedly refused to tackle. This trial and settlement demonstrates that Big Tech can and should be held to account. We have long been calling for action to address harmful and addictive design choices, underpinned by business models that prioritise profit over safety. This outcome demonstrates that, with the right motivation, change is possible.
“However, the denial of wrongdoing is disappointing, as it’s clear Meta’s business model has continuously failed to prioritise child safety. As the case has been cut short, we have been deprived of yet another opportunity to discover more about what Meta really knows about the harm it causes its young and vulnerable users.”
More questions than answers
Ferguson also noted the changes apply only to US users, and it’s unclear whether Meta would voluntarily apply them globally.
“The UK Government must heed this outcome and seize this opportunity to deliver a reset to children’s online safety across all platforms,” Ferguson continued. “Andy Burnham has now seen that it is possible to take on Big Tech to address drivers of online harm. It’s time for the UK Government to be brave, bold and decisive, in ways it hasn’t been before.”
The Labour government, under former Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has already committed to ban access to social media platforms for under-16s, with formal legislation expected to be introduced by Christmas and a law expected to come into force by next spring. Prime Minister Andy Burnham has not publicly commented on whether and how he plans to carry out the policy, or whether commitments from platforms like Meta to change their design could prompt a reconsideration of the ban.
Jake Dubbins, co-founder of the Conscious Advertising Network (CAN) and an advocate for online harm reduction, told The Media Leader the settlement is evidence that Meta’s legal team “clearly had enough concern they would set another big precedent here” and the changes they have committed to make to platform design are “pretty material” and “a good thing”.
He continued: “It’s worth mentioning this [settlement] is one month’s worth of revenue and 30% of last year’s profit. It’s still significant, but how much is a child’s life worth?”
The question Dubbins raises for Meta is whether abandoning “total teen time spent” as a business goal will, in practice, harm the company’s ability to attract advertisers. Only Meta knows how much money it derives from under-18s after two hours of usage time each day, or between midnight and 6:00 AM, for example.
According to media analysis firm Madison & Wall, it’s likely the design changes will have a “negligible” impact on Meta’s bottom line, given the vast majority of adspend on the platform targets adult users and that much of Meta’s recent business growth has been driven by AI-driven improvements.
While Madison & Wall acknowledged restrictions on teen usage should constrain the amount of available inventory on the platform, they concluded “the proportion of advertisers focusing on this younger cohort is marginal enough to be comparatively insignificant in relation to total revenue conversion.”
Questions also remain over how Meta will implement the required changes to its design. It’s unclear, for example, how it will ensure strong age verification, or how it will let users disable personalised feeds. The settlement signals that users will be able to opt out of personalised feeds, rather than be required to opt in. “Will kids do that? How will that be prompted? What’s the adoption level of that, and will that make a material difference?” Dubbins asked.
He also questioned whether Meta’s payout to states will ultimately be given to victims of its platforms’ harmfully addictive features.
David Wilding, a strategist at WPP Media and former director of planning at Twitter UK, similarly raised several questions to The Media Leader, including whether the settlement and its independent auditor will provide Meta with sufficient motivation to move with haste to institute the changes it has committed to.
“Will any measures take a significant chunk out of time spent, in reality?” Wilding further raised. “And can Meta compensate for any loss of teen time with yet more ‘AI improvements’ in ad performance, or will that reach saturation point pretty quickly?”