Meta has agreed to a settlement worth $16.7 billion to 47 states, the District of Columbia, and multiple U.S. territories, and it could change social media as we know it.
The settlement agreement, which was filed on August 26 in the U.S. Northern District of California in Oakland, comes days into a landmark social media trial that put Meta head-to-head with a coalition of state attorneys general who alleged that the tech giant was purposefully designing its social media sites to result in compulsive use among young users.
Meta’s capitulation means that the company will have to pay significant damages to the parties who brought the suit, and, even more consequentially, it will be responsible for implementing a flurry of design changes to Instagram and Facebook.
It’s a bellwether moment for social media regulation that, ultimately, could use new UX design parameters to put some power back into users’ hands.
How we got here
The Meta settlement represents the first major regulatory outcome of a series of trials starring the world’s biggest social media companies that have played out over the course of this summer.
Earlier this year, a court in California found that both Meta and YouTube were negligent for using “addictive” features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and ephemeral content to cause compulsive social media usage in one young. In a New Mexico trial, Meta was found culpable for failing to protect young users from child predators on Instagram and Facebook.
In both of these cases, Meta was only ordered to pay damages to the plaintiffs—but those decisions helped set the scene for this most recent case.
Meta’s trial this August dates back to October 2023, when multiple states sued the company for allegedly designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive. The suit was led by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey.
In a statement leading into the trial, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser laid out the states’ key complaints: first, that Meta “deliberately designed its platforms to exploit young users’ vulnerabilities, foster compulsive use, and maximize the time young people spend on Facebook and Instagram”; second, that it “knew about harms to young users but deceived users, parents, and the public about the risks”; and, third, that it “illegally collected personal information from children under 13 without their parents’ consent, in violation of the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.”
For the past several months, states and lawmakers have been testing whether it might be possible to use the courts to institute broader social media design reforms—and it looks like they have their answer. Now, Meta will need to significantly overhaul its platforms’ UX to meet the plaintiffs’ requirements.
The 5 major design changes to expect from Meta
At its core, this Meta trial—and the similar suits that faced companies including Snap, TikTok, and Youtube earlier this year—are all about the role that design has played in causing compulsive, potentially harmful use among young users.
In the settlement, Meta has agreed to implement several core design changes to Facebook and Instagram. These include:
“Productive pauses” and “non-personalized” feeds
Teen users will now see much more oversight in their doomscrolling. Per the settlement, Meta will need to implement “productive pauses” at 60 minutes and 90 minutes of cumulative daily usage across their platforms, and give teen users a notice if they’ve reached 15 minutes of continuous usage on either Facebook or Instagram.
By default, teen users will also be barred from seeing likes or comments on their posts and using cosmetic filters. They will also be given the option to turn off their feed’s algorithmic recommendations (one of the “addictive” features identified in the trials) and instead opt for a “non-personalized” feed.
“Night mode” for teen users
The settlement breaks down new time management requirements for teen users into two phases. To start, Meta will implement a “Night Access Mode” on teen user’s devices that will disable push notifications and limit messaging from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. It will also give teen users a daily limit of cumulative use of two hours per day across platforms to prevent mindless scrolling.
A later phase proposes to expand Night Mode from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and impose app-specific time limits of 60 minutes each.
The introduction of “School mode”
During school hours, Meta will disable push notifications for teen users (excluding notifications about messaging, account security, or platform integrity), unless their parent modifies that feature. Teen users will not be able to lift their restrictions without their parent, but both the user and the parent will be able to make the settings more restrictive as they see fit.
New age authentication techniques
Within a year, Meta will need to implement new, more stringent methods of determining whether someone is a “teen user,” (between the ages of 13 and 17), or under the age of 13. These categories will then be used to curtail the amount of data that Meta can collect and retain from young users, and help to determine future guardrails around how young users engage with Facebook and Instagram.
Stronger parental controls
Parents will now have much greater access to their childrens’ activity on Meta platforms, including: information about the amount of time their teen user is spending on Instagram and Facebook; the usernames of people messaging the teen user; and notifications should the teen user search repeatedly for terms related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders.