Earlier this week, Meta settled a lawsuit brought by a coalition of state attorneys general and the District of Columbia, which claimed that the company’s products — namely Facebook and Instagram — were harmful to children. One week into trial, Meta agreed
to a settlement that would require them to pay up to a $17 billion penalty, as well as enact a handful of safety precautions for accountholders 17 and under.
These stipulations are extensive. Kids will only have access to Facebook and Instagram for two hours a day, and the apps will be blocked between midnight and 6 a.m. Additionally, notifications will be silenced during school hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays while school is in session), cosmetic-procedure filters will be disabled, likes and reaction numbers will be banned, and kids will have the option to have a non-algorithmic scroll, meaning posts will come through from the accounts they follow in the order they were posted, harkening back to the early days of social media. They will also be required to enact some sort of age verification process, though the details of how that will work are yet to be seen.
Overall, experts say the changes are positive, so long as the company complies, and the independent auditor — another provision of the settlement — is able to do their job effectively. “Of that long list of design changes that Meta has agreed to make, many of them are aligned with research,” explains Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, a nonprofit that studies the effect technology has on kids. “Those that are most aligned are the time limits, night mode, school mode, age assurance, and algorithmic feed control, autoplay, and hidden likes. Those are the ones that researchers have been hammering away at for years, saying they’ve created some of the most problematic use cases among children.”
The important thing now, Perry says, is to start studying how these modifications will change the way kids interact with the apps. “To ensure that we’re getting the product to be as safe as it can possibly be, you’d want to have a new study start right now, to establishing a baseline,” she says.
Candice Feinberg, a clinical psychologist and cofounder of ROWI Teen and Parent Wellness Centers, which works with families experiencing problems with social media, also sees the changes as positive. “I think they’re great ideas,” Feinberg says. “That’s one of the things I like about the whole settlement. Every toy comes with instructions, right? The fact that we have not had any structure for kids around social media has been a problem.”
She points to the algorithmic change as particularly helpful. “Not having an algorithm, it reminds me of when [social media] first came out, [it] was just our friends, so I think it’s great,” Feinberg says. These days, when kids click on a link — even if it was an accident, or part of researching a school assignment — they’ll start to see other social posts on the same topic crop up. “If that stuff is negative, that will have a tremendous effect on your mental health,” she says. “If you’re constantly bombarded with negative images or fear-based statements — it’s difficult for adults, let alone kids.”
Mick Tobin, cofounder of the Young People’s Alliance — which he describes as “like the AARP but for young people” — applauds the changes, particularly those to the algorithmic feed. “Young people I talk to go on their phones, they see one clip of, like, a person dieting, and then next thing they know, the next 10 posts are all about how to be skinny, and how skinny is in,” he says. By eliminating that algorithmic drive, Tobin hopes that social media can go back to being a place where kids can interact and find community, without worrying that watching a single clip will entirely change what they see.
He also appreciates that they’re hiding likes and reactions: “A lot of young people, including myself, grew up really conscious of, ‘How many likes did my post get?’ If I don’t get a certain amount of likes, my value is somehow diminished.”
One thing Tobin doesn’t think will be very effective is the two-hour limit. “I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily opposed to the time limits, but I’m not necessarily in favor of them either,” he says, noting it’s a nuanced problem. The dilemma: On one hand, things like a continuous scroll can suck kids into screens for hours; on the other, kids should have the right to access these apps at their own pace. Additionally, when told they cannot access something, kids will be inclined to find a workaround. “Young people don’t like it when you tell them they can’t do something,” he notes.
The question that remains is how apps will determine who is 18 or over on their platforms. Right now, kids 13 and over can set up teen accounts, but under the new guidelines, the company is required to “institute robust age assurance measures to detect users under 18.” While it’s unclear how they will do that, the experts who spoke with Rolling Stone noted that the company is currently able to effectively do that to target ads. “To verify age sometimes requires either a photograph, fingerprint, or other identification of the child,” explains Perry. “However, it’s been pretty well documented that without those things, that has been fairly accurate in estimating the age of children up to this point.”
Tobin also warns that this should be seen as a beginning, not an end, and as other lawsuits continue to play out in court, the focus should be on pressuring lawmakers to make industry-wide changes. “We need to make sure this is not seen by people as the job is done,” he says. “We need to treat this as a failure of Congress, because if Congress had just passed safe guards years ago — like they had the opportunity to — then we wouldn’t need lawsuits that take multiple years and taxpayer dollars to actually get these companies to do anything.”
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