OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) , Children under 18 will encounter sweeping changes to their Instagram and Facebook experiences as part of a landmark $18 billion settlement Meta Platforms struck Wednesday with 48 U.S. states.
In addition to the financial payout, spread over a decade, Meta has committed to bolstering its age-detection systems to prevent kids under 13 from accessing its platforms and to keep teens in age-appropriate accounts. Other measures include a firm two-hour daily cap for users under 18, restricting app access between midnight and 6 a.m., and concealing “like” counts, along with additional modifications.
Although the changes represent Meta’s most aggressive child-safety measures to date, critics and children’s advocates warned that they will not resolve the company’s many issues immediately.
Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, called the settlement a “significant milestone” but cautioned parents against viewing Instagram as suddenly safe for children.
“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”
Béjar, who was the first witness to testify in the federal trial that the settlement abruptly ended, urged Meta to confront the impact of its content recommendation system on teenagers, which he described as potentially addictive. While teens may close their phones when they hit the two-hour cap, the platform’s design can leave them distressed and craving more content.
According to Meta, users over 18 can opt into individual versions of the new controls, such as daily time-limit reminders, though they will not have the ability to adopt the full teen experience settings.
Stronger age checks
To shield children, Meta first needs to identify them. The company has already deployed artificial intelligence to detect whether kids are misrepresenting their age , whether to create accounts when they are under 13, which is prohibited, or to access adult accounts between ages 13 and 17 , but the system has not always been reliable.
Under the proposed settlement, Meta has agreed to enhance its age-verification technology, drawing on both internal resources and third-party tools, with ongoing external audits to evaluate performance. The agreement establishes specific targets for false positive rates , instances where minors are incorrectly identified as over 18. Additionally, if a user is flagged as under 13 and removed from the platforms, Meta will review the ages of their friends as well.
“The age assurance section is reasonably good because it has measurement, has independent testing, has goals,” Béjar said. “Because I think Meta should be measured on effectiveness, not effort.”
Federal child privacy law requires users to be at least 13 years old to create an account.
During his testimony last week, Béjar described Meta’s approach to kids under 13 as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
“Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world to detect fake accounts,” he said. But despite that, he added, there were “no goals, no metrics” to detect and check kids’ ages who were suspected to be under 13.
Some safety features will be on by default
Critics have long criticized Meta for designing safety features that require users to manually activate them.
Among the protections outlined in the settlement, several will be enabled by default. These include the two-hour time limit, which can only be overridden with parental consent, and the night mode that prevents use between midnight and 6 a.m.
However, other features under the agreement, such as disabling video autoplay or displaying posts in chronological order instead of allowing algorithms to curate feeds, will remain opt-in.
Josh Golin, executive director of online safety nonprofit Fairplay, argued that the deal places too much emphasis on giving parents tools rather than eliminating harmful features outright.
“We are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes,” Golin said.
Questions about default settings emerged during the trial earlier this week, when a lawyer representing the states suing Meta questioned Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, about the low adoption rate among teens of the “take a break” feature, which encourages users to pause after extended scrolling sessions.
When Instagram initially launched the feature, very few teens engaged with it. However, after Meta introduced separate teen accounts in 2024, the company made the prompt a default for teenage users. Even so, teens who did not want to take a break could simply dismiss the notification.
It may take time to see the results
Several researchers have determined that many of Meta’s previous safeguards are ineffective or fail to deliver as promised.
“It is a little premature, unfortunately, to tell if exactly all the changes we want to see are going to happen,” said Yaël Eisenstat, director of policy and impact for the Cybersafety Research Center, which recently evaluated dozens of safety tools from Meta and other social media companies and found most of them lacking.
Still, Eisenstat noted that Wednesday’s settlement represents a significant step in demonstrating that alternative approaches are viable.
For years, Meta “decided to go against the advice of some of their own internal employees and continue to ignore the fact that these design features were unsafe in search of profit,” said Eisenstat, who also previously worked at Meta, then Facebook, before leaving the company in 2019. The measures unveiled Wednesday at the very least demonstrate that technically-feasible options exist to make the platform safer, she said , a point that whistleblowers and others have already “been saying very loudly.”
Like other observers, Eisenstat emphasized that substantial work remains , and that it will demand a combination of technical solutions, market forces, and government regulation.
“There’s no singular silver bullet for fixing all of this,” she said. “I’m just glad that at least we are catching up a little bit now.”
The settlement, which also encompasses the District of Columbia and U.S. territories, still requires judicial approval.
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Grantham-Philips reported from Chicago.