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Meta is asking TikTok and YouTube to, please, think of the children. Because it’s court-mandated. The tech giant settled with 52 attorneys general across states, territories, and the District of Columbia over claims that Meta’s products (Facebook, Instagram, that cover of “Get Low” Mark Zuckerberg did) are harmful to teens. Meta has agreed to pay around $17 billion, as well as institute several safeguarding measures across their social media platforms. The company wrote an open letter to its competitors, TikTok and YouTube, urging them to put the same measures in place. “We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone,” Meta wrote. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens in these ways because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another. For meaningful progress to happen, we urge our peers to join us.”
What are these measures? There will be a two-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram. So if you spend 1 1/2 hours on Insta, that leaves on 30 minutes for Facebook games. Teens will also have a mandatory “night mode,” which will turn off feeds, stories, and reels between midnight and 6am. There will also be notifications every 15 minutes to let teens know they’ve been doomscrolling for a quarter of an hour. In addition, there will also be more parental supervision controls across both apps. According to CNBC, Meta will roll out these measures between six months and a year from now, and will have to keep them going for 10 years. So if this is Social Reckoning spon, it’s pretty elaborate.
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