As governments around the world move to limit children’s exposure to technology and social media, 52 U.S. state attorneys general have reached a settlement with Meta, potentially reshaping how social media platforms protect teenagers from the harmful effects of digital technology.
The approach marks a positive step toward addressing the demands of digital rights organizations at the international level. But its significance will ultimately depend on whether its provisions are translated into concrete action. It also raises a broader question: how effective will these measures be in practice, and what more needs to be done to strengthen and improve them?
The settlement has been described as one of the largest ever reached with a technology company anywhere in the world. Its significance lies not only in its historic scale and $17 billion financial value, but also in its potential to reshape teenagers’ relationship with digital platforms, and, more broadly, to influence how society understands the responsibilities and impact of Big Tech.
Under the settlement, Meta formally agreed to implement a series of measures concerning the use of Instagram and Facebook, with the aim of strengthening protections for teenagers and limiting certain practices that could negatively affect them. The key measures include:

• Limiting users under the age of 18 to a maximum of two hours of use per day, covering their combined use of both platforms. If teenagers want to use the platforms for longer, they will need parental approval.
• Banning app use between midnight and 6 AM, except for private messaging.
• Disabling all notifications between 8 to 3 PM. and between 10 and 7 AM., except for private messages and those flagged as urgent.
• Alerting teenagers after every 15 minutes of continuous use, as well as when they reach 60 and 90 minutes of daily use.
• Hiding the number of likes and other reactions by default for teenagers, including those on their own content and on other users’ content.
• Giving teenagers the ability to disable the personalized algorithm that relies on their activity and interests and switch to a general algorithm that displays content according to standardized criteria rather than the user’s behavior and preferences. This option would help reduce the influence of algorithmic personalization and give teenagers greater control over the content they see.
• Keeping teenagers’ Instagram and Facebook accounts automatically set to privacy-focused settings.
• Limiting the ability of adults suspected of inappropriate behavior to find, follow, contact, message, or interact with teenagers.
• Strengthening technologies for detecting and removing accounts that may belong to children under 13, as well as identifying users between 13 and 17 even if they have entered a date of birth indicating that they are adults.
• Making it easier to report concerning content and improving the speed of responses to such reports, while regularly reviewing teenagers’ exposure to harmful content or experiences.

An independent audit will assess Meta’s compliance annually for five years, with reports submitted to the states that agreed to the settlement.
One of the most significant conditions of the settlement is that Meta will pay only 70% of the total amount, approximately $12.7 billion, to the states over a period of 10 years. Payment of the remaining $5.3 billion will be conditional on its competitors, such as TikTok and YouTube, agreeing to implement similar safety restrictions. 
These three platforms attract the vast majority of teenage users, and applying these measures across all three could bring about a significant change in the digital environment in which teenagers spend time and help reduce many of the risks they face online.
But perhaps one of the most important issues to address going forward is that Meta has not agreed to stop using personalized recommendation algorithms for teenagers. This means that “custom feeds,” the content automatically recommended to each user based on their interests, behavior, and previous interactions, will remain the default experience for teenagers.
What Meta has agreed to do is provide teenagers with an effective way to choose “non-personalized feeds” instead. But this measure likely won’t be sufficient, because the option that relies less on algorithms will still have to be manually selected by the teenager. 
Pressure should therefore be placed on Meta to change this approach so that non-personalized feeds become the default option, rather than feeds driven by recommendation algorithms.
In parallel, the European Union is also working to change the user experience on Meta’s platforms, particularly by limiting design features that may encourage “addictive” use, such as infinite scrolling. This feature allows users to continue browsing content indefinitely by automatically loading new posts as they scroll down the page, without a clear stopping point.
The European Commission has subsequently concluded, on a preliminary basis, that some of the addictive design features used by Meta on Facebook and Instagram may violate the Digital Services Act (DSA), and called for changes to features including infinite scrolling and the autoplay of content.
Around the same time that news of the Meta case began to spread, France moved forward with expanding its ban on mobile phone use in schools to include secondary schools, beginning with this academic year. The move was strongly backed by President Emmanuel Macron.
Government intervention to regulate the use of technology — particularly with the aim of protecting groups most vulnerable to its risks, such as children and teenagers — is therefore beginning to take a clearer shape. These new policies and regulations are likely to have repercussions in other countries and regions around the world.
Despite the fact that the majority of Big Tech companies such as Meta operate globally, decisions determining how their platforms function and are designed are still made almost exclusively in the United States and Europe. 
What is being designed and decided in California directly affects the digital experiences of young people in Beirut, Cairo, Doha, Riyadh, Tunis, and throughout the Arab region. Yet our communities are rarely meaningfully included in the discussions and decisions that shape this digital environment.
Building on SMEX’s role as a leading digital rights organization in the Arab region, we call on Meta to extend this conversation to our region and create meaningful space for dialogue with digital and children’s rights organizations, researchers, parents, and most importantly, young people themselves. Their voices should not be an afterthought, but a central part of shaping the policies and platform designs that influence their digital experiences.
 
The post Meta’s $17 billion teen safety settlement could change social media, but who gets a say? appeared first on SMEX.