Kids under 18 will soon see a host of changes to their Instagram and Facebook experiences thanks to a historic $18 billion settlement Meta Platforms reached Wednesday with 48 U.S. states
OAKLAND, Calif. — Kids under 18 will soon see a host of changes to their Instagram and Facebook experiences thanks to a historic $18 billion settlement Meta Platforms reached Wednesday with 48 U.S. states.
Besides the money, which will be paid out over a decade, Meta has agreed to strengthen its age estimates to keep kids under 13 off its platforms and teens in age-appropriate accounts, enact a hard limit of two hours a day for users under 18, block kids from the apps from midnight to 6 a.m., and hide “like” counts, among other changes.
Meta said the new safeguards will only apply in the United States, with most in place for 10 years.
While acknowledging the changes go further than Meta has ever gone when it comes to child safety, critics and children's advocates cautioned it will not solve its myriad problems overnight.
Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, said the settlement is a “significant milestone,” but parents should not see Instagram as suddenly safe for children.
“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview Wednesday. "It’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”
Béjar, the first witness to testify during the federal trial cut short by the settlement, would like to see Meta address the effect of content recommendations to teens, which he says can prove addictive. While teens might put their phone down when they hit the two-hour limit, they can be distressed about it because the way the platform is designed leaves them craving more.
Meta said people over 18 also can adopt versions of the new controls individually, such as daily time-limit reminders, but there will not be an option for them to opt into the overall settings for what teens experience on the platform.
To protect kids, first Meta has to know who they are. While the company has already been using artificial intelligence to determine if kids are lying about their age — either to sign up if they are under 13, which is not allowed, or to use adult accounts when they are 13 to 17 — it did not always work.
Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to strengthen its technology to check kids’ ages, using its own as well as third-party tools, with regular outside audits on how well it is working. The agreement also includes specific goals around false positive rates — that is, minors who are identified as over 18. And if a user is identified as under 13 and kicked off the platforms, Meta will check the ages of their friends, too.
“The age assurance section is reasonably good because it has measurement, has independent testing, has goals,” Béjar said. “Because I think Meta should be measured on effectiveness, not effort.”
Meta requires users to be at least 13 years old to create an account, in line with federal child privacy law.
In his testimony last week, Béjar said Meta took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach on kids under 13 on its platforms.
“Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world to detect fake accounts,” he said. But despite that, he added, there were “no goals, no metrics” to detect and check kids’ ages who were suspected to be under 13.
