Lights out, Instagram off? The changes to Meta for teens could be a big deal

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The social media company Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion in a settlement in a federal lawsuit alleging the company's social media platforms have harmed children and teens. The company denies the allegations, but has agreed to make a suite of changes to its social platforms — Facebook and Instagram — to make them less compelling and potentially dangerous to minors.

This comes at a time when healthcare providers are increasingly seeing symptoms of social media addiction among youth, says psychologist Mitch Prinstein, who is the Co-Director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"We know that about 50% of kids are reporting at least one symptom of clinical dependency on social media," he says. "We know that kids who are having a difficult time getting off social media are also reporting more depression, loneliness, anxiety, even suicidality over time."

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While Meta denies the allegations that it designed its social platforms to be addictive for kids, child safety advocates and researchers have welcomed the settlement as a major development in holding tech companies accountable.

"This settlement isn't perfect, but I do think it's a critical first step in making sure platforms are safer for our children and that our kids can grow up healthy," says Julie Scelfo, founder of the grassroots organization Mothers Against Media Addiction.

The changes Meta will have to make are intended to reduce the addictiveness of Facebook and Instagram. For example, it will have to give minors the option of having a non-personalized feed, where it doesn't use an algorithm to tailor content based on individual preferences to keep kids scrolling. The changes are detailed in a press release from California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led a coalition of 50 states and territories and the District of Columbia that settled with Meta.

The other reforms Meta has agreed to for people under 18 include:

a default daily time limit of two hours for minors, with only parents having the ability to opt kids out.

a default block on nighttime use from midnight to 6 a.m.

a default block on notifications to minors – both overnight, and from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year.

a ban on showing minors how many likes or reactions their posts receive.

a ban on cosmetic procedure image filters.

a better system for teens to report potentially harmful content and a commitment that Meta respond to 90% of those reports within six hours.

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Meta is also promising to do a better job of verifying users' ages and has agreed to report regularly to an independent auditor.

Meta is calling on other social media companies to make the same changes, and has negotiated that $5 billion of the settlement will be paid to states if other companies join the effort. Texas negotiated an additional $1 billion settlement with Meta.

"This framework will only work if all our peers join us," Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement. "Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away."

Enthusiastic reception from experts

"It is very exciting to see that a lot of the changes that are written into the settlement are very similar to what we saw scientifically," says Prinstein, who was scheduled to testify next week in the case brought by the states.

For example, he says, studies show why the design elements of Facebook and Instagram are particularly addictive for teens and pre-teens.

"By the time a kid turns around ten or 11, the part of their brain that makes them suddenly super interested in things like popularity and who sits at the lunch table are really showing a hypersensitivity to social signals," he says. And so, when kids encounter constant notifications about followers, likes, and dislikes on social media accounts, it easily leads to time spent on these platforms.

"We saw kids unable to stop themselves on these platforms," explains Prinstein. "They would tell us, 'I have tried to quit and I can't. It's interfering with my daily roles and routines.'"

So turning off notifications during school days and overnight should help lower problematic use by minors, he adds.

Making sleep a priority

Similarly, the block on nighttime use could make a big difference to teen mental health, says Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco.

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His analysis of the longitudinal Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study, where researchers have followed thousands of children as they grow up, shows that a big proportion of teens are using their cell phones between midnight and 4 a.m.

"The most used app category during this period was social media," says Nagata. "So I think that it is likely that most of these teenagers are … on social media and getting the notifications and kind of distractions that are impairing their sleep."

And sufficient sleep is key to teen brain development and mental wellness.

Implementation will be important

But Nagata and Prinstein also caution that it remains to be seen whether these changes required by the settlement actually will have the desired effect on kids' experience of social media and their mental health.

"I do think that the details of the implementation are really important," says Nagata. "What we have found, even in some of the testimony during this case, is that it's actually very hard to get some of these things to work."

He is referring to some of the changes Meta had already made on its apps, like the "Take a Break" feature on Instagram, which reminds teen users to close the app after they have been on it for a certain length of time. As Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified in court, the feature wasn't as effective as they had hoped.

"We really need to know how this is going to be implemented," says Nagata, "and then I do think that this needs to be rigorously evaluated. It's not just like we're going to make some changes and then that's it."

Prinstein agrees. "We still need research to make sure that these changes are actually helping, and they're not in some ways making kids worse or kids are finding sneaky ways around them," he says. "So we still have some work to do."

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The settlement does include an agreement from Meta "to maintain, review, and improve existing teen content safety measures" and to "create enhanced parent supervision tools."