Youth safety concerns about Meta's products have been raised for years, with some of the most concerning material emerging from internal Meta research leaked by employees or obtained via legal discovery.
Broadly, Meta's researchers have internally flagged algorithms' tendency to recommend high doses of fitness and beauty content to teens with existing self-esteem issues and the intentional design of features that keep young users scrolling longer than they would independently choose.
Other concerns focused on shortfalls in Meta's handling of user reports and moderation of inappropriate content. Bejar, for example, oversaw work at Meta that concluded that users had bad experiences on Meta's platforms at rates greater than the company's official prevalence estimates.
Such allegations were central to the states' case against Meta, but they are addressed only glancingly in the settlement. Instead, the remedies cited by the attorneys general focus on greater parental controls, time limits and boosting efforts to detect minors misrepresenting themselves as adults.
Meta's ability to identify and remove underage users is itself far from guaranteed as users self-report their ages. In Australia, where the government banned social media use by teenagers under age 16, regulators have found that eight in 10 young teens remain on social media, prompting authorities to consider additional enforcement.
Reaction from teen mental health experts to the settlement was mixed. Dr. Jane Conron, a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said the settlement only requires Meta to offer a non-algorithmically curated social media feed to teens on an opt-in basis, a feature she predicted would go largely unused.
However, the settlement's requirement that Meta cap the number of hours teens spend on Instagram and Facebook each day could be meaningful for some users, she said.
Some of her young patients are so "emotionally overwhelmed by leaving the app" that they cry when their parents attempt to restrict how much time they spend on it, Conron said. A built-in usage limit "will help," she said, adding that she believes the settlement might also change the conversation around social media between teens and their parents.
While the deal did not require Meta to acknowledge fault or accept the claim that it built harmful products, Conron saw its existence as significant.
"I see changes because people will realize the gravity of the problem," she said.
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