Meta has agreed to an $18 billion (£13.3 billion) settlement in the US to resolve claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed children.
The social media giant was accused of knowingly and deliberately designing features to get children addicted to Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with commentators describing it as the industry’s “tobacco moment”, said Sky News.
What happened?
Meta has agreed to make a number of changes to the way Instagram and Facebook operate for its youngest users, while denying any wrongdoing. The settlement “came as a surprise”, said BBC technology editor Zoe Kleinman. “I was expecting weeks of courtroom drama.”
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What will change?
The ruling could “fundamentally change the social media experience for young people in the US”, said The Guardian. The “biggest alteration” is that Meta must now “make many of its safety limitations the default setting” for accounts created by teenagers, a “pivot from its previous opt-in approach to child safety”.
The new safety barriers include a two-hour time limit on Instagram and Facebook for known teen users (direct messaging will not count towards the daily use limit). Meta agreed to limit teen accounts to only one hour a day if other platforms bring in similar time restrictions.
Notifications will be muted between midnight and 6am and between 8am and 3pm on school days. ‘Likes’ will be hidden on posts from teenagers. Meta will also enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content.
Identification or facial recognition verification systems will be used to make sure teenagers aren’t using regular Instagram accounts. But collecting identifying data poses significant privacy risks, said David Greene, legal counsel at digital privacy firm Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The case was brought by 29 US states and was based on the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which is nearly 30 years old. “I would be surprised,” said Kleinman, “if these measures remain within the confines of the US for very long, as other countries will almost certainly be keen to adopt them too.”
The hearing was labelled as social media’s “tobacco moment”, in reference to the trials tobacco firms faced in the 1990s. A “flurry of state lawsuits” forced tobacco companies to stop sponsoring sport and advertising on public transport, banned adverts that “targeted the youth and prevented cigarette companies from putting cartoons on their packets”, said James Titcomb in The Telegraph.
Other social media companies, including YouTube, TikTok’s parent ByteDance, Snap Inc. and Discord, are facing thousands of lawsuits brought by states, school districts and individuals. The litigants claim the companies intentionally designed their platforms to keep young users hooked. The lawsuits come as politicians are considering stricter rules aimed at protecting young users.
If other tech giants follow Meta’s lead, then social media “might indeed start to look more like tobacco: still a regular part of life, but heavily regulated and restricted, and widely understood to be bad for you”.
