Meta has reached a settlement in a US court case, agreeing to pay up to $16.7 billion and introduce changes to its Instagram and Facebook platforms for teenage users. The company denies the allegations, and no court has determined that its products caused harm.
The states involved in the case alleged that Meta designed features to encourage young people to keep scrolling and withheld information about its own research findings. These claims will not be tested before a judge due to the settlement.
The features at issue include infinite scroll, autoplay, unpredictable notifications, like counts, and filters. Professor Alan Woodward, Professor of Cybersecurity at the University of Surrey, noted that these are standard industry practices and not secret engineering.
While the changes are legally binding only in the US, Meta typically implements teen safety features worldwide once developed. European regulators are also pushing for similar measures, meaning some changes may reach British teenagers, though this is not guaranteed.
Implementing features like timers or overnight blocks is straightforward, but identifying teenagers accurately remains a challenge. All limits in the agreement apply only to accounts identified as belonging to a minor, and age checks can be imperfect, as minors may use false dates of birth or parent logins.
The effectiveness of daily caps and overnight blocks on teenage mental health is untested at this scale. However, the settlement mandates an independent auditor to assess whether the measures work, and if these results are published, they could provide significant insights.
Dr. Holly Bear, Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford, highlighted that platform recommendation systems are likely driving a substantial proportion of harmful content. She suggested that non-personalised feeds are a plausible idea, but independent evidence for this specific measure is limited.