ATLANTA — An agreement to resolve a federal lawsuit brought by Georgia and other states and U.S. jurisdictions would require Meta to impose new limits on teen accounts on its social media platforms while also giving parents the option for more control.
The operator of Facebook and Instagram also agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to the plaintiffs as part of the settlement proposal filed Wednesday in federal district court in California.
The proceeds would be shared among 47 states, Washington, D.C. and several U.S. territories, with Georgia to receive between $100 million and $135 million, state Attorney General Chris Carr's office said.
Carr called it a landmark agreement, suggesting in a statement that there could be future cases, "and while
Meta is the first to come to the table, they shouldn’t be the last. It shouldn’t take lawsuits, legislation or investigations to do the right thing."
The lawsuit grew from a bipartisan, nationwide investigation that alleged Meta had designed Instagram to addict children despite the resulting mental health harms the company documented but did not publicly disclose, Carr's office said.
The settlement also would resolve claims against Meta for sharing nonpublic information about Facebook users with Cambridge Analytica and others ahead of the 2016 election.
The leader of Fairplay, a Boston-based organization that has pressured state and federal lawmakers to act, heralded the settlement as a "watershed moment" protecting children from "addictive and dangerously designed social media."
Still, Fairplay Executive Director Josh Golin said the court agreement did not exact enough concessions from Meta.
"We are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes," Golin said in a statement. "In general, the settlement is too focused on offering parents tools rather than restricting harmful features."
The agreement calls on Meta to limit teen access to its platforms to two hours per day with access restricted from midnight to 6 a.m. and to restrict notifications during school hours. It also would limit features linked to eroding mental health, such as plastic surgery filters and "like" counts.
Meta already bans accounts for those under 13. The settlement would require the company to implement better processes to identify users that young and delete their accounts.
The agreement also would require that Meta encourage parents of teens ages 13 to 17 to take supervisory control over their children's accounts.
Parents who take that step would be notified if their child communicates with another adult on the platform or engages in repeated searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.
Meta would also have to give teens a "reasonably accessible" option to turn off algorithmic feeds, something parents could also control if their child's account was enrolled in parental supervision. The account would then be restricted to content from accounts the teen follows, in chronological order.
Child-protection advocates were disappointed that those features required parents to opt in.
"If it's not a default, it doesn't get picked up," said Sharon Winkler. "That's pretty weak."
Winkler has testified before the Georgia General Assembly about the risks of unbridled child access to social media.
Her son, Alex Peiser, died by suicide at age 17 in 2014, and she blames the Instagram algorithm that she said sent him dark memes, such as images of corpses, after he broke up with his girlfriend.
"He didn't want to see pro-suicide stuff," she said. "He wanted breakup songs" and support.
Winkler was also disappointed that the protections against child-adult interactions were optional rather than automatic.
"Good start but much more work to go," she said.
Under the terms of the agreement, the settlement funds could pay for a variety of services, including crisis intervention, after-school or summer programs, youth mental health programming, outdoor activities, and investigations and litigation to improve teen safety on social media. A spokeswoman for Carr's office said Georgia's proceeds would go into the state treasury.
This article is available through a partnership with Capitol Beat News Service, a project of the Georgia Press Association's nonprofit, tax-exempt Educational Foundation.
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Meta settlement adds new teen safety rules for users
