Meta has agreed to introduce new safety features in the US to protect young users on platforms Instagram and Facebook.
This comes as a result of an $ 18bn USD ($ 30bn NZD) settlement deal reached between Meta and the US District Court for the Northern District of California. According to The Conversation, the lawsuit’s key claims included that the social media platforms have been engineered to be addictive, that Meta misled the public about the harm caused by the platforms, and that it collected data from children aged under 13 without parental consent.
New safety features
The new safety features will exist in participating juridisctions across the US and be for anyone on the platforms believed to be aged 13 to 17.
The features include a night mode that blocks access to Facebook and Instagram from midnight to 6am by default, with notifications silenced from 10pm to 7am.
A combined daily time cap of two hours will exist across both platforms, notifications will again be silenced during school hours, and users will be forced to have a “break” at 60 and 90 minutes of daily use, with them also receiving a “nudge” after 15 minutes of continuous scrolling.
Design changes also include like counts being hidden by default, filters that reshape your face are out and teens must be offered a non-personalised feed – meaning their pages aren’t chosen by an algorithm – within 10 days of joining and every 90 days after.
Following this landmark settlement, local industry leaders Calibre + Candor’s Ben Woollams, Stitch’s Adnan Khan and Thompson Spencer’s Sam Casey have some thoughts. They share them below.
Ben Woollams, Calibre + Candor’s digital specialist
“We knew this was coming – well not this exactly, but a version of this. Australia has banned teens from social media platforms already, and with both National and Labour on board it’s only a matter of time until it happens here too.
The US settlement doesn’t amount to a ban exactly but will represent a significant curbing of teen usage once implemented. Of course, the devil is always in the details. Below are what I’d consider the key questions and implications of this ruling, the under 16s bans and similar changes coming down the line:
- The question of enforcement: in order to action these changes Meta needs to be able to correctly identify who is a teen, and who isn’t. Proposed methods include estimating age from user photos, personal ID, and account behaviour signals. While reducing harmful use of these platforms from younger users is undoubtedly a win, the monkey paw might be curling when it comes to the cost of encouraging the same platforms to collect more personal data from them.
- Who’s next? Meta is far from the only social media platform with harmful content. Looking beyond social media the internet in general is a wild west of violent, extremist, or sexually explicit content. What qualifies as social media? What qualifies as harmful content? I for one want to see AI products that produce nudes from user photos without consent torpedoed into oblivion.
- Where it falls short: The US settlement focuses primarily on time of use and distraction during school hours. A good start, but little is done to address radicalisation. Users are still served content based on an algorithm to drive engagement that all too often spirals into more and more extreme content. This remains the platforms’ most dangerous element, and the option of a chronological feed does not do enough to address this. Meta only recently announced the retirement of independent fact checking and now claims they will respond to reports of extreme content within six hours.
- Improved media in the short term, questions in the long term: Marketers don’t generally want to market to teens online, and platforms don’t want to get caught serving ads to minors either, to protect their own liability. Measures that reduce teen accounts and hours online will reduce that risk. It does however raise questions of the platform’s sustainability in the long term. Meta already skews older than TikTok and if younger users opt not to enter the platform at all, or drop off from using it, then what does that mean for audience size and user retention in the longer term?
- Advertisers need to be ready to shift away from social channels: This is a beachhead moment; there will be more. There has long been an appetite from the public to regulate big tech, even if legislation has fallen behind. Platform changes to reduce addictive behaviour have come first, but privacy first legislation that restricts the ability of advertisers to use detailed behavioural data for targeting is next. Be prepared to have the same conversations we did when we thought the cookie was dying, alternative tactics will need to be found in social, and likely alternative platforms for our performance campaigns.”
Adnan Khan, Stitch managing partner
On the settlement: “This is the most significant structural intervention we have seen in how a platform serves young people. A two-hour daily cap, overnight lockouts and a chronological feed option for under-18s codify what parents and regulators have been asking for over a decade. The hard part is not the rules, it is enforcement. Age assurance has always been the weak link, and the commitment to independent auditing and cross-account detection is what makes this settlement more than a press release.”
“Australia has already moved with its under-16 social media restrictions, so this settlement compounds a trend rather than starting one. We would expect Meta to standardise these protections globally rather than run different teen experiences by market, because fragmented compliance is more expensive than uniform compliance. For New Zealand, these changes will likely arrive here regardless of any local regulation. The clause that tightens limits further if YouTube and TikTok adopt equivalent protections is clever, and could pull the whole category toward a 60-minute norm.”
“For advertisers, the maths is simple: less teen time on platform, less personalised delivery, and therefore less addressable teen inventory. Brands that have rented their audience relationships from Meta’s algorithm will feel this first. The winners will be brands that own their customer data and can build direct relationships through their own channels. This settlement is another signal that the era of infinite, cheap, algorithmically targeted reach is closing, and first-party data strategy is no longer optional.”
Sam Casey, Thompson Spencer head of performance
“Across my career as a digital advertiser, I’ve been held accountable and to such high standards to prevent any young people from seeing ads that are irrelevant or inappropriate on social media. Ramifications for this can range from harm to the client’s brand/image to financial penalties. It’s great to now see the platform owners, not just the advertisers, taking ownership of the harm their platforms can cause and installing far more protections for minors. Now as advertisers we can be even more confident we are within guidelines and standards, and not exposing minors to advertising not meant for them.
“From an organic perspective, I’m interested how the feed features will affect content: reducing screen time, introducing non-personalised feeds, and hiding like/reaction counts all seem like they will have an effect on engagement metrics by removing key parts of the feedback loop that causes endless scrolling. Whether this has an impact on the type of content created or increased reach within a more appropriate audience is yet to be seen, but it is still a great step forward for the protection of minors on the platform.”
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