Consumer Advocate 

In late August, Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson announced a landmark $17.1 billion multistate settlement with Meta that requires the company to implement sweeping new safety measures designed to better protect children and teens on Instagram and Facebook.

“With this historic settlement, Meta agrees to establish meaningful protections for young users,” Wilson said. “Digital platforms that cater to children have a duty to shield impressionable minds from the risks of unchecked exposure to social media.”

Under the proposed agreement, Ohio is expected to receive more than $319 million over the next decade. The settlement resolves claims that Meta designed its social media platforms with features intended to keep young users engaged and addicted, knowingly exposed children and teens to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, while also violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data of children under the age of 13.

The agreement represents a victory for the protection of children online and marks a significant step toward fundamentally transforming how the entire social media industry designs products for children and teens.

That safety features that Meta is required to implement on Instagram and Facebook include:

• Daily time limits and “productive pauses” for children. The hard cap for the two platforms is a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling.
• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from midnight to 6 a.m.
• Elimination of push notifications from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays during the school year.
• Robust assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.
• Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying and content that may promote harmful behavior, such as eating disorders, suicide, and self-harm.
• Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.
• Disabling of social comparison features, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in children and teens.

Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be assessed regularly by an independent auditor and the settling states.

Attorney General Wilson acknowledged that this problem extends well beyond one company. The agreement establishes groundbreaking changes to Instagram and Facebook that are more significant and comprehensive than any previously ordered by a court or agreed to by a social media company.