Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement

Meta settled its latest kids online safety trial with a group of 29 state attorneys general, sparing it from the remainder of a trial that could have cost it hundreds of billions of dollars.

Under the terms of the settlement, which resolves claims by a larger group of 47 states and several districts and territories, Meta agreed to come up with an age assurance standard that is subject to independent testing, and must have a false positive rate no higher than 10 percent for users aged 16 to 17, and 3 percent for users aged 13 to 15. The company also agreed to give teens the option to turn off personalized feeds, meaning that they won’t be shown content based on Meta’s recommendation algorithm, and Meta will suspend push notifications for teens between 10 PM and 7 AM unless parents disable those restrictions, as well as limit teens to two hours of Meta app usage per day (with exceptions for messaging and “longform content”).

Meta will also agree to pay $17.1 billion to states over a period of 10 years. The company outlined its obligations in a blog post, noting that $5.3 billion of this money will only be paid out if YouTube and TikTok implement their own daily time limits and each pay an equivalent amount to that figure.

The agreement requires Meta to try to link accounts owned by a single user to prevent circumvention of its new rules, and provide an appeals process for users. Users who say they’re over 18 but don’t complete the age assurance test within two weeks will have restrictions on their accounts meant to “restrict potential adult bad actors” from contacting teens, and be served “content recommendations inspired by Age Appropriate Experiences.” Meta will also disable push notifications during school hours for teens, unless their parents allow them. It will also implement “productive pauses” at 60 and 90 minutes of cumulative daily use of its apps, and give “a Clear and Conspicuous notice” after 15 minutes of use.

The company also agreed to disable filters that simulate cosmetic procedures for teens, and likes on posts to prevent social comparison. It says it will not make false or misleading statements about the efficacy of its safety features.

Another part of the settlement references “Age Signals from Google and Apple Operating Systems and App Stores,” and says Meta will incorporate reliable signals shared by those companies into its age assurance framework. This is something Meta has been lobbying states and Congress to force Apple and Google to do.

“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement. “Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.”