Meta Calls on TikTok, YouTube to Echo Terms of Their Agreement with Attorneys General
/A week ago, Connecticut Attorney General William Tong announced a landmark $17.1 billion multistate settlement with Meta Platforms, Inc. that will enforce “sweeping new safety reforms to protect American children on Instagram and Facebook.”
The agreement resolves claims by 51 attorneys general – including AG Tong - that the company designed Instagram with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, among other things. This settlement was described by Tong as a “monumental victory for the protection of America’s children and will fundamentally transform how the entire social media industry designs products for kids and teens.”
Connecticut is to receive up to $265.4 million, with at least half of all funds directed to remediate youth harms from social media, including but not limited to support for mental health and crisis intervention, after school and summer school programming, and implementation of phone-free school zones. This is the largest state settlement with a single defendant in history.
Meta, in a post featured in the company’s news page, explained that “While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day. All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.
“For meaningful progress to happen, we urge TikTok and YouTube to join us and state attorneys general in adopting this new standard, to ensure teens use social media in a healthy and responsible way.”
Meta also highlighted what the company described as New Protections for Teens and Stronger Controls for Parents:
· Time Limit: A default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission. This limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts.
· Night Mode: A default block from our apps between midnight and 6am. This means teens will not be able to post or view their Feed, Stories, Explore, or Reels, for example.
· School Mode: Notifications will be muted by default between 8 AM and 3 PM. During those hours, teens will no longer receive push notifications, except for direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety.
· Regular Prompts: Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram. They’ll also receive prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes. These prompts are designed to encourage intentional use.
· Algorithmic Feed Control: Teens will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed — one that isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems — as their default. We will periodically remind them of this option, and parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
· Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay, so that content no longer automatically plays. Instead, they’ll need to take a deliberate action, like a tap or swipe, to see more. Parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
· Hidden Likes: Teens won’t see the number of likes and reactions on posts — both their own and those from others — by default.
· Disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters: In addition to our existing policy to block teens from using cosmetic surgery filters, we’ll now block teens from using extreme makeup filters.
Additional safeguards, as described by Meta:
· Unwanted contact from strangers: We will maintain our current practices of defaulting teens into private accounts on Instagram and private default settings on Facebook, and we’ll continue to restrict potentially suspicious adults from contacting them. We will also strengthen our efforts to make it harder for those adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.
· Reporting and ongoing protection from harmful content: We will continue to give teens easy ways to report content that concerns them, and we’ll work to improve our response times. We will also continue our work to protect teens from potentially harmful experiences by regularly evaluating how often teens are exposed to them. We’ll draw on research and expert input to improve our work.
· Strengthening our parental controls: We will encourage parents to set up our supervision tools and give them new controls and insights. This includes notifying parents when a teen links a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and providing periodic updates on their teen’s usage and any changes their teen attempts to make to their protective settings.
