LIST: What’s changing for Facebook, Instagram in the wake of US settlement
Meta Platforms will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade and add limits to how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under an agreement with nearly all US states to resolve claims it designed those social media platforms to addict children.
Below are the changes Meta is planning to implement, at least in the US for now, over time:
- Setting time limits: Meta will seta two-hour time limit that teen users can only turn off with parental permission, and works cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram use. As such, time spent on either app counts toward this time limit, and Meta can also tell if a user has multiple accounts.
- Night Mode and School Mode: These two modes restrict access to Facebook during bedtime and school time. Night Mode blocks use from midnight to 6 am, while School Mode mutes notifications from 8 am to 3pm, with the exception of direct messages and safety and security alerts.
- Prompts to take breaks: Teens will get prompted to take breaks after 15 minutes of continuous Facebook or Instagram use, and will be alerted if they’ve reached the 60-minute and 90-minute marks for their time-limited usage.
- Algorithmic feed control: Teens will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed, or a feed that isn’t personalized by recommendation systems as their default option. Meta will also periodically remind users the option exists, while parents can set their children’s default experience to require this setting.
- Control of automatic play settings: Teens can turn off autoplay settings such that they need to tap or swipe to see more — basically adding friction to endless scroll mechanisms.
- Hiding engagement and some image filters: Teens will be unable to see the amount of likes and reactions on posts, whether it’s their own posts or posts from others. This will become a default setting. Meanwhile, image filters for cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup will also be disabled for teens.
- Investing in better age checks: Meta said it would be “investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s” alongside strengthening the technology it uses to identify users between the ages of 13 and 17. This is to prevent users who say they’re older by using adult birthdays from bypassing content settings meant for those in the teens age group, such as preventing teens from following or interacting with age-inappropriate accounts.
- Preventing ‘stranger danger’ scenarios: Meta will default teens into private accounts on Instagram and private default settings on Facebook, so as to restrict potentially suspicious adults from contacting them. The company also promised to strengthen efforts to make it harder for those adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.
- Moderation promises: Meta promised “easy ways to report content that concerns them” alongside working to improve company response times to reports and evaluating teen exposure to potentially harmful experiences to better improve how they operate.
- Parental controls: Meta will encourage parents to use supervision tools and provide them with new controls and insights, such as telling parents when a teen sets up a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and giving status updates on teen usage and any attempts to change protective settings that have been introduced.
Meta added that an independent auditor will periodically assess the company’s work on these safety features, and these audits would be happening over a five-year period. This independent auditor will have access to Meta and will be reporting concerns to attorneys general of the states involved in the settlement.
An independent social media research foundation will also be formed. The company wrote, “Meta will share consented user data with the foundation to advance independent research into teen well-being and grow our collective understanding of how to best support teens online.” – Rappler.com
