Meta will cut teens off of Instagram after two hours

Two-hour usage limits, age verification, and a $17.1 billion payout: We're breaking down today's big settlement in Meta's kids online safety trial. Senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner and senior tech and policy editor Adi Robertson discuss how we got here, why Meta settled, and what this means for the ongoing conversation around teen mental health and social media. Further reading: Meta agrees to heavy restrictions on teen users in major lawsuit settlement Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:02Speaker 02

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of two-hour usage limits. I'm senior policy reporter Lauren Finer. Meta settled its latest kids' online safety trial today, and it agreed to implement age verification, two-hour usage limits, and pay $17.1 billion to states. It's a big deal. I'm here with senior tech and policy editor Addie Robertson to break it down. And what it means for the ongoing conversation around teens, mental health, and social media. Hi, Addie.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Hey.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  So just to remind people what this particular Meta trial is about. This was a case where a group of 29 state AGs were suing Meta and saying that it basically misled users about how safe its platforms were for teens, and also that it broke the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, which basically says that you can't host kids under 13 on your platforms without their parents' permission. So Addie, can you maybe break down for us how big a deal this was compared to all the other litigation that we've seen against Meta recently?

• 2:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is sort of the continuing of a losing streak for Meta. And we are both, we both know this, but Meta has lost, it lost a case in Southern California, a state-level case earlier this year, when a jury voted against it and found it was liable for harm to a user. Then that cost it, I think, $6 million is the verdict against it. And then it lost a case in New Mexico about also misleading over child safety and who was using its services. That was a, believe, nearing about $1 billion in damages as of the last check-in. And now this is definitely the largest fine to date.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  It is not a jury verdict against them, so they don't have to admit wrongdoing, but it's a lot of money, and they're agreeing to a bunch of changes that they have fought in other circumstances.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. And yeah, just to be clear, the $6 million that it had to pay in LA, that was split between Meta and YouTube. So that wasn't even just for Meta. And I think what's interesting here is just that it's so many state AGs, and they have the power to ask for these sweeping changes that we wouldn't see in these personal injury cases. And it goes far beyond just like New Mexico, like we saw in that case, despite the big price tag there.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  An important thing to note is that they're doing this voluntarily means we're not going to get what we almost certainly would have seen if, say, Meta went to trial and lost, which is that they appeal this, and then it goes to an appeals court, whether it's even possible for them to require this. Because I think there are some pretty real questions about whether, say, you can legally require a company to set these extremely granular restrictions on how people use its products, and on when they're reminded, and when they can use push notifications. And this just bypasses all of that for, I believe, 10 years for most of the changes.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I totally agree. And before we get into why Meta would have wanted to settle this, maybe let's like lay out some of the, some of what's in the settlement. So I know we've already alluded to that they have agreed to implement certain age verification measures. Those are going to be able to be audited by a third-party auditor, and make sure that they're able to hit certain thresholds for false positivity rate. They're also going to have to implement two-hour usage limits across its apps for teens. And they're going to have to limit notifications during school hours and nighttime hours for teens. And also, there you have to give teens the options

• 4:54Speaker 02

  to get rid of their personalized feeds, so that, in theory, it might be a reverse cron feed. Addie, were there any others that stood out to you?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  I think that's the big ones. There are some like weird exceptions to the two-hour usage limit. Like, it doesn't apply to messaging, and it doesn't apply to quote-unquote "long-form content," which is long video and audio. So I think there's some sort of wiggle room around the edges. But it's kind of a long list of changes that people who criticize Meta have been asking for, for a long time.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. And I'm curious how you think these will actually work. Like, do you think it's going to do what the AGs think it will?

• 5:31Speaker 03

  I think there are really, really open questions about this. So some of these features already were in existence. Some of them are already being applied to teen accounts. It was, some of them have sort of flipped from opt-in to opt-out over the years. I think that people are maybe going to see less dramatic results than the people who are harshest critics of Meta think they will. But it's definitely big changes. I think that age verification in particular is just, that's a thing that's been going across the entire internet. I think there are really huge privacy implications there, potentially pretty significant risks. And I think this kind of effectively bypasses, in some ways, the entire policy discussion that people have been having over it by just saying Meta's going to roll it out.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Yeah, I agree. I think it's not totally clear to me how different things are going to feel, except for maybe, you know, not having to, not getting push notifications during the day for teens, or, you know, nighttime notifications, things that are really tangible like that. But in terms of like how the age verification is implemented, I think a lot of that remains to be seen and how, how much things really change.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  There's also the caveat that parents can turn this off.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. There are also certain parts of the settlement, I think, where it kind of states like, Meta already has taken steps to do XYZ, such as with their teen accounts. So I think there are certain things where Meta is leaning on the work that's already done in recent years and months to carry this out.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Which it kind of did in response to these lawsuits, at least in the broad sense. That some of this is, Meta's going to just continue doing changes that it made after it was sued.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I guess let's get into the question of why Meta would have settled here. So you kind of talked a little bit about how you feel about it. Can you just expand on why you think Meta would have settled at this point and not gone all the way through?

• 7:27Speaker 03

  So Meta, as we've just mentioned, has lost a couple of cases. I think that there is a pretty clear sense that it's definitely not legally untouchable. It definitely is not necessarily very sympathetic to juries. And the risks if it loses are, I mean, you've written a lot about the bellwether trials, are in part that this informs the outcome for a bunch of trials down and cases in the future. And this way, they do not have to admit wrongdoing. So I think there are a number of upsides. There's kind of general questions of like, oh, well, do they think that there would have been testimony down the road that would have been damaging to them? Adam Mosseri was in the middle of testifying when this settlement was reached. I don't necessarily know that that's a huge deal in this case.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  But it does mean they don't have to go through this remaining potentially fairly long trial.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually think it kind of makes a lot of sense to me why Meta would want to settle this case. Because I don't, I think at this point, they already had their executives testify. So they're probably not too worried about what would come out there. But I think it's just something that's been hanging over them for such a long time. And I think this actually gives them like a document to point to in all the other cases and, you know, legislation that they're discussing to be like, okay, here's what we said we can live up to. And, you know, that might be easier for them to implement than some of the things that states or legislatures might otherwise want them to put in place.

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• 11:03Speaker 02

  An interesting part of the settlement was that Meta and the AG is basically put a contingency in place for other industry players to get involved here and have to step up to the plate. And I think that actually puts Meta in an interesting position where they get to almost position themselves as taking the high road over their industry peers, but also getting to pressure peers to do something that's in line with the terms it's agreed to. Because otherwise, it might be at a disadvantage to them.

• 11:37Speaker 03

  I was going to say they got a really funny bit of leverage out of this. Just to clarify what we're talking about, Meta has agreed to pay around $17 billion. They say around $18 billion to states. However, 30% of that only gets paid out if YouTube and TikTok also each contribute that amount and also make changes that are similar to what Meta is making, including usage limits. So Meta gets to both position themselves as taking the high road and they get to try to make sure that everyone else is working on the same disadvantages they are. Everyone being just companies that are comparable in size. That's how they work. That's why they are called out in this particular settlement. And then they also, if that doesn't happen,

• 12:22Speaker 03

  they get to just say they paid $17 billion and then actually not pay about $5 billion of that. I will say I've seen people sort of saying, oh, well, they could have paid a huge amount like this is peanuts. And it sounds a little bit like all the numbers we're saying are just made up. But it is still a very large amount of money. I looked up their Q2 results and their revenue, their net revenue was about $15 billion for the last quarter. So it's not a negligible amount.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Definitely. And I think we often hear about the headline numbers here, but I think really the changes that they're going to be made to implement are way more important. But it is still significant that it is a big sum. And they've already said in the second quarter, they had to spend $2 billion on legal expenses. So it's really starting to add up for them. I guess maybe we should address why the AGs would settle here. Why do you think they would take a settlement here?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, I will first clarify that I'm not a lawyer, but this just comes up whenever anybody settles what seems like a slam dunk. And it's that you are taking a pretty significant gamble on any case that you push forward instead of settling. This happens pretty frequently. It's not that unusual. The numbers that get thrown around for the potential fees that they could have taken Meta for are just astronomically high. They're, I think I, they're in the hundreds of billions or potentially higher. But those are numbers that I think we just have not seen borne out in other cases where they lost. So I think that they got a decent amount of money. They got like certainly a pretty significant sum.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  They got a lot of the changes they were asking for. They got them without Meta, then fighting them on say constitutional grounds for the next several years. I think that they got a pretty decent deal out of this.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. And I think from the statements I've been seeing recently from groups that were supportive of the AGs and, you know, parents who've been leading this fight against the tech companies for a long time. It seems like they're pretty, they're pretty happy with what they got out of the settlement. And I think you're right that, you know, any trial verdict would have been wrapped up in appeals for a long time. And so it's pretty significant for them to have gotten what they did. So yeah, I mean, let's maybe step back a little bit and talk about how we got to this point with this trial and this settlement. We've kind of alluded to there's all of these other cases going on. There's a group of cases in LA that are personal injury cases, individual plaintiffs

• 14:53Speaker 02

  who are suing not just Meta, but other tech companies as well for allegations of harm that they experienced on those platforms. And then we have this other, you know, big set of cases that this AG trial was a part of. And that also includes other personal, you know, individual plaintiffs and also school districts that are suing several of the platforms over, you know, just having to deal with mental health issues that they think were caused by platforms. So, you know, that's a lot that's been going on. Plus, we have legislation in Congress and throughout the country dealing with kids' online safety issues.

• 15:35Speaker 02

  So I guess, you know, how do you position, you know, this settlement within that larger context of all of these cases? Like how, what's the significance of where this lands?

• 15:49Speaker 03

  I think that it's definitely not going to stop the existing cases, especially because all of them were filed before these changes were implemented. I do think that it doesn't really, it means that Meta is not losing ground in a legal sense in the way that a loss would have given them. But I also don't think that it's going to really particularly stem the tide of say calls for legislation. It's funny that Meta also included a section in their blog talking about how they really hoped that we would make Apple and Google do more age verification. So they're still doing that. That's still going on. I think that this fight is absolutely not over. I think this was a skirmish in it.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  A very, very expensive skirmish for Meta.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I kind of chuckled at that part of the settlement where they talk about, you know, Meta will take age signals from Apple and Google from their operating systems and app stores, which is something they've been lobbying across the country to make Apple and Google do. So I guess just to wrap it up, like what, what are the implications of this verdict beyond Meta for other industry players here?

• 17:02Speaker 03

  I think that the very obvious ball that got thrown is to YouTube and TikTok, as we've talked about. And I do feel like the thing Meta is going to be doing here is sort of normalizing a lot of the features that people have been calling for social media companies to implement. I don't totally know how all of them would work in other feet, in other areas. Like, I don't know how you really do it. One hour daily limit on YouTube, which is the home of largely long form videos, especially when even Meta isn't putting that limit on long form videos. Like, I don't really know how you translate some of these things across different apps. It's very sort of strange. But it does feel like Meta is potentially going to be raising the bar for what's considered normal.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks, Addie, for joining me to talk this out.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  That's it for The Vergecast. Let us know what you think. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 or email [email protected]. And to support everything we do here and get ad free podcasts, subscribe to The Verge. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The Vergecast is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Larchek. See you next time.

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