Meta reached an agreement on Wednesday August 26 with 51 American states and territories who accused it of having designed Facebook and Instagram to get children addicted. Here are its main provisions, which will only come into force for adolescents in these jurisdictions, after validation by a federal judge.
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• Money
Meta will pay a little more than 12 billion dollars guaranteed: 11.7 billion in ten annual installments until 2035 and 459 million to settle old claims linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Another $5 billion will only be due if Snap, TikTok and YouTube agree to comparable rules and payments, for a total of around $17 billion.
The money is earmarked for youth mental health and prevention, but its final allocation goes to state legislatures.
• Restrictions
Within six months, the accounts of 13-17 year olds in the territories concerned will, by default, be blocked from midnight to 6 a.m. local time, excluding messaging. Notifications will be muted from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during school hours.
Teenagers will be limited to two hours per day on Instagram and Facebook combined. Messaging and long videos – at least 22 minutes – do not count.
The number of “likes” will be hidden by default, filters imitating cosmetic surgery prohibited and a feed not personalized by the algorithm will be offered within four months. According to Meta, American teenagers spend on average about an hour per day on Instagram.
• Conditional hardening
If Snap, TikTok and YouTube submit to the same obligations, by agreement or by law, state by state, the nighttime blocking will extend from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and the daily limit will drop to one hour per application, and for ten years instead of five.
• Age verification
Meta has one year to deploy an age verification system: the tools used should not take more than 3% of 13-15 year olds and 10% of 16-17 year olds for adults. A new account that is not age verified after 14 days will be treated as a teenage account.
For those under 13, banned from the platform by federal law, Meta must assume that a reported account is that of a child, unless proven otherwise, and develop a detection model within the year. The question of whether Meta violated this law remains unanswered: the agreement is “agnostic” on this point, the States acknowledged at the hearing.
• The role of parents
Only a parent whose account is linked to that of the teenager will be able to relax the curfew or time limit. He will receive the time spent by his child every day and will be able to adjust class times.
The weak point, recognized by both camps at the hearing: there is still no guarantee that the “supervising parent” is indeed the parent. Neither birth certificate nor bank card is required. Meta admitted a “very difficult challenge” with no “clear solution” at this stage; States are talking about “emerging” technologies to solve the problem, also under discussion in Europe or Australia.
• Control and sanctions
An independent auditor, paid by Meta, will monitor the application for ten years. A separate clause in the agreement prohibits Meta from making misleading statements about its safety features for teens.
• What the agreement does not address
It only applies to the United States and, Meta clarified, does not prejudge anything elsewhere. It does not cover Snap, TikTok and YouTube, nor the thousands of complaints from families and school districts, nor New Mexico and Florida, which are continuing their proceedings.
• Why an agreement rather than a law
“If a legislature passed a law requiring Meta to limit screen time for teens, it would probably not survive the scrutiny of the First Amendment,” which protects freedom of expression, Vincent Joralemon of the University of Berkeley told AFP. “But nothing prevents a private company from imposing these rules on itself.” Suing platforms to get them to comply “is a clever circumvention” of this protection.
With AFP
