How teen accounts on Instagram and Facebook are changing after Meta's $18B US settlement

How teen accounts on Instagram and Facebook are changing after Meta's $18B US settlement

'Writing is on the wall for the social media industry,' says analyst

Changes are coming for teen users of social media platforms Instagram and Facebook.

Parent company Meta agreed this week to make platform design changes for young users and pay up to $18 billion US over the next decade to resolve claims of online harms to youth stemming from nearly every U.S. state and territory.

A coalition of U.S. attorneys general have described it as the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside of the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

"The writing is on the wall for the social media industry. This is their tobacco moment," said Canadian tech analyst Carmi Levy.

"Things change for Meta and other companies like it from this point forward."

New measures are coming for the Instagram and Facebook accounts of users under 18, including:

Meta says it will continue existing work blocking strangers from contacting teen accounts and improve reporting tools and parental controls.

It also vowed to toughen some of its new measures — for instance, further reducing the daily time limit to one hour — if rival social platforms Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube also adopted comparable ones.

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Does this affect Canadian teens too?

Technically the settlement applies to the U.S. market — and American teens should expect to see these changes in the next few months, Levy says — but teens everywhere should get ready. Levy says these tweaks will likely spread wider given the concern in so many countries about negative social media impacts on youth.

"Historically, whenever technology companies like Meta introduce significant changes to their infrastructure in a certain region, eventually they do go global," he said from London, Ont.

"I would expect over time Canada will see these changes as well. It's a lot easier for these companies to maintain a common set of tools and features around the world than to have unique features for each country where they do business."

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Does this make social media safer?

The settlement is a step in the right direction, says Jenny Perez, mom of a middle-schooler and founder of the parental advocacy group Unplugged Canada. Yet she sees a much longer list of safety concerns for social media companies to tackle.

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Adding a few measures to address what kids experience "is somewhat helpful, but doesn't fix the fact that these products are addictive," she said from Vancouver.

Digital media expert Richard Lachman lauds the interruption to infinite scrolling — a time-suck that's not unlike what researchers of gambling addiction explore, he noted. Yet the computer scientist and digital media professor at Toronto Metropolitan University says he'd rather not solely rely on what a company says it's doing to make itself safer.

"Right now we have Meta's designers saying 'These are the steps we're going to take. Trust us,'" Lachman said. "I would be much happier with an independent, third-party [review]."

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Luke Stark, an associate professor of information and media studies at Western University, says the announced measures will help stem some compulsive social media use by teens. Yet he pointed out the measures are limited, noting for instance that older users are also drawn in by addictive platform design.

"These systems affect everybody," he said from London, Ont.

Though Stark calls the settlement "a big example — of which there are not very many — of Meta changing its design under threat of legal action," he thinks it could have gone further.

"The general business model of Facebook hasn't really been touched by this."

What does this mean for proposed regulations in Canada?

Thousands of U.S. state and federal lawsuits still face Meta, Snap (parent of the platform Snapchat), Alphabet (YouTube) and ByteDance (TikTok), but American cases must be considered very differently from those in Canada or internationally, said Toronto tech analyst Ritesh Kotak.

Still, he thinks this week could be a hint of what's to come. "Meta may consider settling and just ending some of these lawsuits once and for all."

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The decision to settle "indicates to me that Meta understands that it's got a problem and that it has to kind of get ahead of any kind of regulatory effort," said David Fewer, a law professor at the University of Ottawa.

Fewer suggests Meta's moves could pave the way to fulfilling requirements for Canada's proposed online safety legislation, though there's still "a lot more regulatory clay" to work with, he said, like Canadian calls to tackle addictive algorithm design. "We shouldn't mistake what Meta can live with, with what Canadians deserve."

Back in Toronto, Lachman thinks Meta is eager to resolve its social media woes so as to shift its attention to artificial intelligence.

"They want this to go away so they can focus on AI," he said.

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"They don't want to be mired in this. And even though $10, 15, 20 billion US sounds like a lot of money to us, in the size of the potential market for its AI ambitions, with the reach they have into regular daily use by billions of people around the world, this is where [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] wants to play."

With files from Deana Sumanac, Cameron MacIntosh, Laura MacNaughton and Larry Guerriero