That story contains a list of features agreed on in the settlement ( https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3447.1.pdf ). I’m seeing a lot of disinfo here about what this lawsuit was about.
The specific features don’t even matter that much, but for the record:
- Time Limit: A default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission. This limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts.
- Night Mode: A default block from our apps between midnight and 6am. This means teens will not be able to post or view their Feed, Stories, Explore, or Reels, for example.
- School Mode: Notifications will be muted by default between 8 AM and 3 PM. During those hours, teens will no longer receive push notifications, except for direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety.
- Regular Prompts: Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram. They’ll also receive prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes. These prompts are designed to encourage intentional use.
- Algorithmic Feed Control: Teens will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed — one that isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems — as their default. We will periodically remind them of this option, and parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
- Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay, so that content no longer automatically plays. Instead, they’ll need to take a deliberate action, like a tap or swipe, to see more. Parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
- Hidden Likes: Teens won’t see the number of likes and reactions on posts — both their own and those from others — by default.
- Disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters: In addition to our existing policy to block teens from using cosmetic surgery filters, we’ll now block teens from using extreme makeup filters.
- Age Assurance: We work hard to find and remove underage accounts from our apps and, as part of our agreement, we’re investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s. We’re also strengthening the technology we use to identify accounts that may be between the ages of 13 and 17, so we can ensure those accounts are placed in experiences designed for teens, even if they give us an adult birthday. However, to ensure teens are consistently protected across the many apps they use, app stores must provide developers with verified age information. This will allow platforms to put age-appropriate protections in place for as many teens as possible. That’s why we’ll continue to advocate for legislation that empowers parents by requiring app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval before a teen downloads an app.
- Age-appropriate content restrictions: We will maintain our current content standards so that, by default, teens are placed into 13+ content settings, inspired by movie ratings criteria and parent feedback. We will also continue to prevent teens from following or interacting with accounts we consider age-inappropriate. We will work to continually improve these systems to ensure age-appropriate content experiences for teens.
- Unwanted contact from strangers: We will maintain our current practices of defaulting teens into private accounts on Instagram and private default settings on Facebook, and we’ll continue to restrict potentially suspicious adults from contacting them. We will also strengthen our efforts to make it harder for those adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.
- Reporting and ongoing protection from harmful content: We will continue to give teens easy ways to report content that concerns them, and we’ll work to improve our response times. We will also continue our work to protect teens from potentially harmful experiences by regularly evaluating how often teens are exposed to them. We’ll draw on research and expert input to improve our work.
- Strengthening our parental controls: We will encourage parents to set up our supervision tools and give them new controls and insights. This includes notifying parents when a teen links a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and providing periodic updates on their teen’s usage and any changes their teen attempts to make to their protective settings.
While I appreciate that they intend to block extreme makeup or cosmetic surgery filters, I don’t see anything about blocking AI-generated content that could be similarly harmful.
There’s this:
“Sensitive Aggregate Content” refers to content that, in the aggregate, may be inappropriate for Teen Users. For the purposes of this Agreement, Sensitive Aggregate Content shall mean nutritional discussion, personal weight and physical fitness accomplishments, muscular physiques, promotion or depiction of non-invasive aesthetic procedures for maximizing physical attractiveness, depiction of certain body parts commonly associated with body idealization, and depiction or discussion of personal experience living with mental or emotional distress
This means suppressing looksmaxxing, or ana-mia, but also discussions of mental health, or trans issues. Suppressing deviant ideas is certainly the main point. If that will help with anorexia and such issues is doubtful, as far as I know.
Using an app that lets me block apps on my device with built-in safety features to stop me from cheating, I’ve finally got a hold of my social media usage (and going away from Instagram and Reddit, that helped too). Thing is, I’m a grown-ass adult, and it still was that hard for me to do it. Two hours a day is still so much fucking time. And across two services, too, there is three more social media channels they can spend 2 hours each on and suddenly you spent 8 hours a day online. This agreement is shit.
Wait…so we… w-w-w-won?
The day I take any advice from Meta is the day I’d close my business for good.
Beats parenting.
Dude you have no clue how fucking hard it is to keep kids away from this shit.
“Well just parent better”
Man you can try but kids just love making bad decisions and finding ways around blocks and filters left and right. Like I’m over letting my kid have anything more technical than two tin cups with some string.
then take away their fucking phone. they can call you with a dumb phone. they earned it. they may get back their phone in 2 weeks, until then, there’s the computer.
IDK, I have a kid and nowadays there is OS level filters. Router level filters. The only wah my kid is getting around this stuff is if they guess my password. I mean… Good luck my password vault password is over 20 characters long and I don’t even know the others as a result.
My experience as a parent is parents telling themselves it’s too hard too too complicated to do the basics like turn on parental controls and configure it. I can’t do anything if my kid looks at YouTube, plays roblox or whatever on some other kid’s device, but at least I can do harm reduction same my parents and the harm of the day.
I hate these laws because often I’m forced to either allow my kid access to everything or nothing not even the stuff I want to teach her slowly how to safely use. These laws are the worst because I lost control because other parents can’t be bothered to turn on baked in parental controls, have decent passwords and/or listen to whining.
Nah. Look, see, I put blocks on a lot of shit. Screentime to limit how much time he gets, no safari access or other browser, contact limits, etc. won’t go into the whole background of why, but look.
First it was Spotify. Kid was dead tired mid day and come to find out when I check Screentime it’s cause he was up till like 3 or 4 am on Spotify and finally figured out it’s not cause he was falling asleep to it, no he found out there’s videos on it and watching them all hours. This was a while back.
The. recently I find he’s constantly asking for access to this fucking TCG app, and he’s obsessed with Pokémon and all about selling cards and shit. Turns out that because the apps just a shitty wrapper he’s using it to get on Reddit and DM’ing rando’s and shit because he is the kind of kid to text a number he found on the floor, no joke.
Then removing that he figures he can just use fucking maps to open a safari sub window and have free web access.
Fuck sakes like kinda impressed at the finding holes, but also he’s a god damn drug addict after anything he can get his hands on. Hence the reason I’m ready to hand him two tin cans with string.
