Meta reaches $17.1 Billion settlement over teen safety practices
Meta Platforms Inc. has reached a settlement with a coalition of 47 US states, the District of Columbia, and several territories, resolving claims brought by a group of 29 state attorneys general concerning the safety of teenage users of its services. Under the settlement, Meta must develop an age‑assurance standard that will be independently tested and must keep the false‑positive rate at no more than ten per cent for users aged 16‑17 and three per cent for users aged 13‑15. The company must also give teens the option to turn off personalised feeds, suspend push notifications between 22:00 and 07:00 unless a parent disables the restriction, and limit daily usage of its apps to two hours per day, with exceptions for messaging and ‘long‑form content’.
Meta will implement ‘productive pauses’ at 60 and 90 minutes of cumulative daily use, provide a clear and conspicuous notice after 15 minutes, and disable push notifications during school hours unless a parent allows them. The settlement requires Meta to link accounts that belong to the same user to prevent circumvention of the new rules, to offer an appeals process, and to restrict accounts of users who claim to be over 18 but do not complete the age‑assurance test within two weeks. Additional measures include disabling filters that simulate cosmetic procedures for teens, disabling likes on posts for teens, and refraining from false or misleading statements about the efficacy of the safety features.
Meta will pay US$17.1 billion to the states over a ten‑year period. US$5.3 billion of this amount is conditional on YouTube and TikTok implementing comparable daily time‑limit limits and each paying an equivalent sum. The settlement also requires Meta to incorporate ‘Age Signals’ from Google and Apple operating systems and app stores into its age‑assurance framework.
Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement: ‘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. 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.’
No response from the other parties mentioned in the settlement was provided in the source.
