Meta has agreed to pay a massive settlement and make platform changes to resolve litigation brought by a group of U.S. states.
The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, will pay $18 billion to those states, bringing an end to a trial that had recently begun over claims that its platforms violate state consumer protection laws and negatively impact young users.
As part of the deal, Meta also agreed to make several notable changes to its platform. This includes daily usage limits for young users on Facebook and Instagram, as well as restrictions on overnight access and notifications during school hours.
The trial was about children’s online privacy, and was based on a US law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which is nearly 30 years old and predates all of today’s biggest social platforms.
It centred around Meta’s historic gathering and use of data belonging to children under the age of 13 over a period of several years.
There had been intense speculation that Meta would have faced hundreds of billions of dollars in fines if it had lost.
The worst-case scenario, which would have been the maximum penalty imposed for every single child who used one of its platforms for more than half an hour a day during a 12-year window, was $1.4tn (£1tn) – roughly the same as the company’s entire value.
Meta is not admitting to any wrongdoing.
The Changes
As part of the settlement, Meta has agreed to make a number of changes to the way Instagram and Facebook operate for its youngest users.
The new safety barriers include a two-hour time limit across both platforms, which will be a default setting for known teen users. But direct messaging on the platforms will not count towards the daily use limit.
Notifications will be muted between midnight and 06:00 and on school days between 08:00 and 15:00.
Likes on posts and content will also be entirely hidden on the platforms for teens.
Most of these new features will be made either default or an option for teens within six months.
However, new efforts by Meta to better identify which users on its platforms are children will take up to a year to be rolled out.
Meta also says the new features will only truly help children if all of its rivals adopt them as well.
