By now you’ve almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta’…
The specific features don’t even matter that much, but for the record:
Time Limit: A default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent’s permission. This limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts.
Night Mode: A default block from our apps between midnight and 6am. This means teens will not be able to post or view their Feed, Stories, Explore, or Reels, for example.
School Mode: Notifications will be muted by default between 8 AM and 3 PM. During those hours, teens will no longer receive push notifications, except for direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety.
Regular Prompts: Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram. They’ll also receive prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes. These prompts are designed to encourage intentional use.
Algorithmic Feed Control: Teens will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed — one that isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems — as their default. We will periodically remind them of this option, and parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay, so that content no longer automatically plays. Instead, they’ll need to take a deliberate action, like a tap or swipe, to see more. Parents can choose to adjust their teen’s default experience to require this setting.
Hidden Likes: Teens won’t see the number of likes and reactions on posts — both their own and those from others — by default.
Disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters: In addition to our existing policy to block teens from using cosmetic surgery filters, we’ll now block teens from using extreme makeup filters.
Age Assurance: We work hard to find and remove underage accounts from our apps and, as part of our agreement, we’re investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s. We’re also strengthening the technology we use to identify accounts that may be between the ages of 13 and 17, so we can ensure those accounts are placed in experiences designed for teens, even if they give us an adult birthday. However, to ensure teens are consistently protected across the many apps they use, app stores must provide developers with verified age information. This will allow platforms to put age-appropriate protections in place for as many teens as possible. That’s why we’ll continue to advocate for legislation that empowers parents by requiring app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval before a teen downloads an app.
Age-appropriate content restrictions: We will maintain our current content standards so that, by default, teens are placed into 13+ content settings, inspired by movie ratings criteria and parent feedback. We will also continue to prevent teens from following or interacting with accounts we consider age-inappropriate. We will work to continually improve these systems to ensure age-appropriate content experiences for teens.
Unwanted contact from strangers: We will maintain our current practices of defaulting teens into private accounts on Instagram and private default settings on Facebook, and we’ll continue to restrict potentially suspicious adults from contacting them. We will also strengthen our efforts to make it harder for those adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.
Reporting and ongoing protection from harmful content: We will continue to give teens easy ways to report content that concerns them, and we’ll work to improve our response times. We will also continue our work to protect teens from potentially harmful experiences by regularly evaluating how often teens are exposed to them. We’ll draw on research and expert input to improve our work.
Strengthening our parental controls: We will encourage parents to set up our supervision tools and give them new controls and insights. This includes notifying parents when a teen links a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and providing periodic updates on their teen’s usage and any changes their teen attempts to make to their protective settings.
Age Assurance: We work hard to find and remove underage accounts from our apps and, as part of our agreement, we’re investing in even stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s. We’re also strengthening the technology we use to identify accounts that may be between the ages of 13 and 17, so we can ensure those accounts are placed in experiences designed for teens, even if they give us an adult birthday. However, to ensure teens are consistently protected across the many apps they use, app stores must provide developers with verified age information. This will allow platforms to put age-appropriate protections in place for as many teens as possible. That’s why we’ll continue to advocate for legislation that empowers parents by requiring app stores to verify age and obtain parental approval before a teen downloads an app.
Age-appropriate content restrictions: We will maintain our current content standards so that, by default, teens are placed into 13+ content settings, inspired by movie ratings criteria and parent feedback. We will also continue to prevent teens from following or interacting with accounts we consider age-inappropriate. We will work to continually improve these systems to ensure age-appropriate content experiences for teens.
So, more powergrabs by the state to force these invasive anti-features down everyone’s throats.
I really despise the suckers falling for thin pretexts of “child safety” & “mental health” as excuses to assault our liberties and the free flow of information with measures enabling authorities to more closely track & control our activities on information systems of all things.
While I appreciate that they intend to block extreme makeup or cosmetic surgery filters, I don’t see anything about blocking AI-generated content that could be similarly harmful.
“Sensitive Aggregate Content” refers to content that, in the aggregate, may be
inappropriate for Teen Users. For the purposes of this Agreement, Sensitive Aggregate
Content shall mean nutritional discussion, personal weight and physical fitness
accomplishments, muscular physiques, promotion or depiction of non-invasive aesthetic
procedures for maximizing physical attractiveness, depiction of certain body parts
commonly associated with body idealization, and depiction or discussion of personal
experience living with mental or emotional distress
This means suppressing looksmaxxing, or ana-mia, but also discussions of mental health, or trans issues. Suppressing deviant ideas is certainly the main point. If that will help with anorexia and such issues is doubtful, as far as I know.
I think it should be possible to change the behavior of scrolling globally via browser plugin. Maybe there is already a plugin? I made a note to look into it. No promises.
Using an app that lets me block apps on my device with built-in safety features to stop me from cheating, I’ve finally got a hold of my social media usage (and going away from Instagram and Reddit, that helped too). Thing is, I’m a grown-ass adult, and it still was that hard for me to do it. Two hours a day is still so much fucking time. And across two services, too, there is three more social media channels they can spend 2 hours each on and suddenly you spent 8 hours a day online. This agreement is shit.
The self-control issues you wrote about seem a you problem.
I don’t imagine any agreement out there fixing that unless we assume we can’t treat you like an autonomous adult making grown-ass choices when you know what you’re getting into, so an authority must step in to stop you from yourself.
Surrendering that to authority frankly goes against the social contract that respects individuals’ basic liberties.
And this gist of the article is that a lot of that would violate the First Amendment if the government forced Meta to do it, and putting it in a settlement instead of a law and making it an “industry standard” is just a way for the government to get around that.
That story contains a list of features agreed on in the settlement ( https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.3447.1.pdf ). I’m seeing a lot of disinfo here about what this lawsuit was about.
So, more powergrabs by the state to force these invasive anti-features down everyone’s throats.
I really despise the suckers falling for thin pretexts of “child safety” & “mental health” as excuses to assault our liberties and the free flow of information with measures enabling authorities to more closely track & control our activities on information systems of all things.
While I appreciate that they intend to block extreme makeup or cosmetic surgery filters, I don’t see anything about blocking AI-generated content that could be similarly harmful.
There’s this:
This means suppressing looksmaxxing, or ana-mia, but also discussions of mental health, or trans issues. Suppressing deviant ideas is certainly the main point. If that will help with anorexia and such issues is doubtful, as far as I know.
In other words they want age verification laws so they can make their dangerous addictive product less addictive for teens specifically?
Not really.
Say, which features would you like for yourself? One could include them in Fediverse clients.
No infinite scrolling is a big one, making one have to manually go to the next page of content helps add natural break points.
I think it should be possible to change the behavior of scrolling globally via browser plugin. Maybe there is already a plugin? I made a note to look into it. No promises.
100% the non algorithmic feed, they word it as only being available to teens. I want that, and I’m old.
Lemmy already has that. Or are you looking for non-personalized recommendations?
No! Algorithm bad because reasons.
Sorting by hot or active is an algorithm. Hell, sorting by post recency is too.
Am I reading this incorrectly or is Meta mandated by the settlement to lobby for age assurance legistaltion?
I think it’s more the states/governments that are expected to force the same onto Meta’s competitors.
Using an app that lets me block apps on my device with built-in safety features to stop me from cheating, I’ve finally got a hold of my social media usage (and going away from Instagram and Reddit, that helped too). Thing is, I’m a grown-ass adult, and it still was that hard for me to do it. Two hours a day is still so much fucking time. And across two services, too, there is three more social media channels they can spend 2 hours each on and suddenly you spent 8 hours a day online. This agreement is shit.
The self-control issues you wrote about seem a you problem. I don’t imagine any agreement out there fixing that unless we assume we can’t treat you like an autonomous adult making grown-ass choices when you know what you’re getting into, so an authority must step in to stop you from yourself. Surrendering that to authority frankly goes against the social contract that respects individuals’ basic liberties.
And this gist of the article is that a lot of that would violate the First Amendment if the government forced Meta to do it, and putting it in a settlement instead of a law and making it an “industry standard” is just a way for the government to get around that.
Wait…so we… w-w-w-won?
We did not.