Meta to pay up to $18 billion to resolve allegations its platforms harm children

When a jury trial began last week in federal court in Oakland, California, state attorneys argued that the tech company knew millions of 11- and 12-year-old users were on Instagram and Facebook over the years but “did little to keep them away” from the platforms.

Although the trial only lasted five days, state attorneys relied heavily on information found in millions of internal Meta documents provided in the case. They included internal investigations, employee emails and chat logs that reached CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

An internal investigation at Instagram stated: “Teenagers have an addict narrative about use.” Still, the states argued, Meta was aimed at young users.

“The trial did not go well for Meta,” Bonta said Wednesday.

Meta maintained during the brief test that it had worked extensively over the years to make its platforms safer for its younger users, investing resources in testing and research and creating new features.

“We are always working on the safety of teenagers,” Instagram head Adam Mosseri said during an hour of court testimony Tuesday.

The case was settled and the court adjourned before it could reappear before a jury.

Before Mosseri’s testimony, a former Meta investigator, George Volichenko, appeared and with his lawyers reviewed several internal communications in which he had participated about Meta’s work on security.

Volichenko said he struggled to understand when he was at the company in 2022 why the team he worked on wasn’t given more freedom to better test and implement new security features.

One of them was “silent mode,” which silenced notifications for teen users at night. His team knew that this feature would be adopted much more widely if Meta turned it on by default.

He recalled that his manager told him that he “shouldn’t worry too much about adoption numbers being low, because the team exists in part to protect the company against upcoming lawsuits.”

However, as part of Wednesday’s deal, a feature called “night mode,” which blocks notifications between midnight and 6 a.m., will now be on by default, meaning they will turn on automatically. The setting is also designed to be disabled only by a parent or guardian.

“The framework we have negotiated will allow parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” ​​said CJ Mahoney, chief legal officer at Meta.

Other features for teen users that will be implemented as part of the agreement include:

As for the new daily time limit for teen users, it will be reduced to one hour of total daily usage if other social media platforms like TikTok, Snap, and YouTube also agree to implement new restrictions for young users.

Bonta urged such platforms to do so, saying the agreement with Meta “is a good model” for other companies to follow.

If not, he suggested Wednesday that his office would now be “more focused” on introducing changes across the social media industry.

Meta also said that TikTok and YouTube should implement the same safety features for their younger users.

“Our new time limit commitments, night mode features, and usage limits during school hours set the right path for our entire industry, but this framework will only work if all of our peers join us,” Meta’s Mahoney said.

YouTube and TikTok have been contacted for comment.

District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb called the Meta settlement a “monumental public health victory.”

He added: “The security features Meta must install will fundamentally and immediately change the way young people use Instagram and Facebook.”