As part of Meta’s landmark settlement, the tech giant will pay up to around US $18 billion and add new safeguards to protect teens aged 13 to 17 who use Facebook and Instagram.

These will include a night mode with default settings that block access between midnight and 6am, and silences notifications overnight. Notifications will also be silenced during school hours. There will be daily time limits, ‘like’ counts will be hidden and ‘cosmetic procedure filters’ will be off by default, plus there will be parental supervision features and stronger age verification.

The new rules will only apply in America, but there’s hope they may flow through to Australia, said Dr Belinda Barnet is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Swinburne University of Technology.

“Meta has implemented the ‘ban’ on kids using social media very inefficiently in Australia. So, we do still have 60-70% of kids in Australia potentially exposed to these addictive features,” Dr Barnet said.

“If Meta maintains certain addictive features in Australia such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, and no time limits but changes them in the US, you would hope our government moves to have them changed here too.”

Not hitting at the core issue

Dr Rahat Masood, a Senior Lecturer in Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales, says while the changes are positive, they only address part of a much larger problem.

“Children are among the most vulnerable users of digital technologies, and their risks extend far beyond Facebook, Instagram and traditional social media,” Dr Masood said.

Meta is currently pushing for TikTok and YouTube to put the same measures in place. But Dr Masood says it needs to be even broader than that.

“Children increasingly interact with AI companion bots, conversational AI services, educational apps, games and other digital platforms. These technologies can expose them to multiple risks, including excessive collection of personal information, profiling, misinformation, age-inappropriate or harmful content, manipulative interactions, and recommendations or conversations that may encourage unsafe actions,” Dr Masood said.

She says safety and privacy need to be designed in to prevent harm – rather than responding after the harm occurs.

Professor Marian-Andrei Rizoiu, Head of the Behavioural Data Science Lab and Professor of AI and Behavioural Data Science at the University of Technology Sydney noted the settlement does not change what the technology optimises for.

“Time caps, notification curfews and hiding like counts all limit exposure. None of them touches the engine underneath, which still has one job: maximise engagement,” Professor Rizoiu said.

“The mechanism doing the damage is intermittent reward, the same schedule that makes poker machines work and the most addictive one we know of in the literature,” she added.

Acknowledgment that the platforms harm wellbeing

Associate Professor Julia Coffey, a sociology researcher at The University of Newcastle platforms must be forced to take responsibility for the negative impacts their design features cause to mental health.

“Meta’s changes to time limits, stopping notifications during school, a block on the app overnight, and bans on plastic surgery filters are an acknowledgment that these features cause significant harm,” she said.

“In a context where the social media age restrictions in Australia are ineffective in blocking access, and do not address the cause of social media harms anyway, the outcomes of this lawsuit are promising.”

Dr Susanne Schweizer is a Scientia Associate Professor in Psychology and an ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of New South Wales, who also sees the settlement as a step in the right direction that will make Facebook and Instagram safer for young users.

“Usage limits and night-time blocks are features already available in the apps but not enforced. Activating these features by default for young people can reduce screen exposure before sleep and excessive social media use, both of which are digital behaviours associated with poorer youth wellbeing,” Associate Professor Schweizer said.