“Youth safety initiatives”
Just more ID and tracking requirements that people will have to upload so these megacorps can profit off of and sell your data amongst themselves.
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2026
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Unrelated but despite this superficial win, Zuckerbeg still had enough money to buy an Irish castle. Like WTF dude. All these stupid billionaires need to be sunk in a sub.
The headline still reads like something I would show to the capitalist bootlickers like it's that one scene in Bird Box
No they didn’t. It’s to be paid over 10 years
It's also only $5B unless...
Yeah, the headline is bad. But the story contains fairly good information and analysis.
The $5B is the conditional bit:
The agreement includes a payment of approximately $18 billion, which can be used to fund youth online safety initiatives, among other state priorities. The payment will be distributed in annual installments over a 10-year period. Participating states will receive approximately 70% (approximately $12.7 billion) of the allocated payment over the decade. The remaining 30% (approximately $5.3 billion) will be released only after two specific conditions are met.
- YouTube and TikTok implement a one-hour Daily Limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures.
- YouTube and TikTok each pay an amount matching the 30% figure, with half of the remaining funds tied to YouTube’s payment and half tied to TikTok’s.
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.
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.
There's this:
“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.
Oof, suppressing discussion of trans issues and mental health will go very badly for some teenagers
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.
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?
that's why I'm here :) was talking about social media in general, fb insta etc. any auto recommendation I'd want to throw out. of course popular, hot new most comment etc are fine when there's an option
No! Algorithm bad because reasons.
Sorting by hot or active is an algorithm. Hell, sorting by post recency is too.
No infinite scrolling is a big one, making one have to manually go to the next page of content helps add natural break points.
So, this is kind of embarrassing. I actually did make a note. I would have forgotten to get back to this otherwise. But I might as well have googled it immediately. It took like 2 minutes to find that there are lots of plugins that suppress the infinite scroll. Nothing for me to contribute, I guess.
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.
I mean, we don’t allow some substances to be consumed by certain age groups, or people altogether. But that is only the most glaring flaw in your argument, I’m sure if I wouldn’t half-ass my answer like you did, I could find more.
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.
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.
Beats parenting.
Dude you have no clue how fucking hard it is to keep kids away from this shit.
“Well just parent better”
Man you can try but kids just love making bad decisions and finding ways around blocks and filters left and right. Like I’m over letting my kid have anything more technical than two tin cups with some string.
IDK, I have a kid and nowadays there is OS level filters. Router level filters. The only wah my kid is getting around this stuff is if they guess my password. I mean.. Good luck my password vault password is over 20 characters long and I don't even know the others as a result.
My experience as a parent is parents telling themselves it's too hard too too complicated to do the basics like turn on parental controls and configure it. I can't do anything if my kid looks at YouTube, plays roblox or whatever on some other kid's device, but at least I can do harm reduction same my parents and the harm of the day.
I hate these laws because often I'm forced to either allow my kid access to everything or nothing not even the stuff I want to teach her slowly how to safely use. These laws are the worst because I lost control because other parents can't be bothered to turn on baked in parental controls, have decent passwords and/or listen to whining.
That's just to Unterkomplex. Ppl are genuinely unable to do router based blocking
Nah. Look, see, I put blocks on a lot of shit. Screentime to limit how much time he gets, no safari access or other browser, contact limits, etc. won’t go into the whole background of why, but look.
First it was Spotify. Kid was dead tired mid day and come to find out when I check Screentime it’s cause he was up till like 3 or 4 am on Spotify and finally figured out it’s not cause he was falling asleep to it, no he found out there’s videos on it and watching them all hours. This was a while back.
The. recently I find he’s constantly asking for access to this fucking TCG app, and he’s obsessed with Pokémon and all about selling cards and shit. Turns out that because the apps just a shitty wrapper he’s using it to get on Reddit and DM’ing rando’s and shit because he is the kind of kid to text a number he found on the floor, no joke.
Then removing that he figures he can just use fucking maps to open a safari sub window and have free web access.
Fuck sakes like kinda impressed at the finding holes, but also he’s a god damn drug addict after anything he can get his hands on. Hence the reason I’m ready to hand him two tin cans with string.
Not trying to tell you to parent better, shit's hard, but I see two possible things that might help.
First, any device he uses should be filtered from the open internet on router level with a white list of approved things he can access.
And second, you really need to talk with him about it. Why it's a bad idea to text numbers of the floor, how cards are gambling and how specifically gabling will ruin his life and about addiction and how almost everything on the internet is designed to create it and abuse it. These would be long and not just once conversations with examples and reiterations because the subjects are complex and he will need a long time to process and absorb all that.
Good luck!
Yeah man, we’ve had many long talks about it. Doesn’t seem to get through. He says he understands, but then this shit happens. It’s just an ongoing thing
then take away their fucking phone. they can call you with a dumb phone. they earned it. they may get back their phone in 2 weeks, until then, there's the computer.
Yeah way ahead of you man. Already have. Been through this many many many time. Just over it.
You know what’s wild? Dumb phones have no way to block that crappy old browser. Also being able to see where they are is useful. And dude smart/dumb phones are expensive.
they have a web browser? weird, how is that usable on such a small screen and without a pointing device?
well not cheap, but I wouldn't call them expensive either. these are the prices where I live, in HUF so you need to convert it: https://www.arukereso.hu/mobiltelefon-c3277/klasszikus/
Children benefit from online anonymity. Destroying their anonymity harms children.
The day I take any advice from Meta is the day I'd close my business for good.