No more doomscrolling till dawn: Meta sets curfews for teen Instagram use

So what will Meta's new child safety rules actually mean for your kids' feeds? From now on, Instagram and Facebook will look and feel different for anyone under 18. Meta has agreed to a nearly $18 billion (€15.4bn) settlement with 48 US states, introducing a two-hour daily limit, a midnight-to-6am blackout and hidden "like" counts, among other changes. The deal, reached on Wednesday, will see Meta pay out the settlement over a decade. The company said the new safeguards would apply only in the United States, with most measures remaining in place for 10 years. While critics acknowledged the changes go further than any child safety measures Meta has previously introduced, they cautioned the settlement would not resolve the platform's problems overnight. Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, called the settlement a "significant milestone" but said parents should not assume Instagram is now safe for children. "The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm," Béjar said. "It's one thing to say, 'Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,' but it's still as bad for you because of what's getting delivered." Béjar, the first witness to testify in the federal trial that the settlement cut short, said he wanted Meta to address the effect of content recommendations on teenagers, which he argues can prove addictive. He said teenagers who hit the two-hour limit could still feel pressure to keep scrolling because of how the platform is designed. Meta said adults could also adopt individual versions of the new controls, such as daily time-limit reminders, but would not be able to opt into the full settings designed for teenage users.

Stronger age checks

Meta has agreed to strengthen its age-verification technology, combining its own tools with third-party systems, and will submit to regular independent audits of their effectiveness. The settlement sets specific targets for false positive rates — cases in which minors are wrongly identified as adults. If a user is identified as under 13 and removed from the platforms, Meta will also check the ages of their friends. "The age assurance section is reasonably good because it has measurement, has independent testing, has goals," Béjar said. "I think Meta should be measured on effectiveness, not effort." Federal child privacy law requires users to be at least 13 to hold an account. Béjar testified last week that Meta had taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach to enforcing this. "Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world to detect fake accounts," he said, but had "no goals, no metrics" for identifying and verifying users suspected to be under 13.

Defaults, not just options

Critics have long argued that too many of Meta's safety features require users to switch them on manually. Under the settlement, several will now be enabled by default, including the two-hour time limit, which can only be disabled with a parent's permission, and the overnight block between midnight and 6 am. Other features, such as turning off video autoplay or displaying posts in chronological order rather than through an algorithm, will remain opt-in. Josh Golin, executive director of the online safety group Fairplay, said the settlement leaned too heavily on giving parents tools rather than restricting harmful features outright. "We are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes," Golin said. During the trial, a lawyer representing the states pressed Instagram head Adam Mosseri on the low take-up among teenagers of the app's "take a break" feature, which prompts users to pause after extended scrolling. Few teenagers used the feature when it first launched, though Meta made it a default setting for teen accounts after introducing them in 2024. Users can still swipe away the notification if they choose not to take a break.

Results may take time to show

Researchers have previously found that many of Meta's past safety measures proved ineffective or fell short of expectations. "It is a little premature, unfortunately, to tell if exactly all the changes we want to see are going to happen," said Yaël Eisenstat, director of policy and impact at the Cybersafety Research Center, which recently audited safety tools across Meta and other platforms and found most fell short. Still, Eisenstat described Wednesday's settlement as a significant step, showing that alternative approaches to platform design are possible. Eisenstat, who previously worked at Facebook before leaving in 2019, said Meta had "decided to go against the advice of some of their own internal employees and continue to ignore the fact that these design features were unsafe in search of profit." She said the measures announced this week showed there were technically feasible options for making the platform safer — something whistleblowers had "been saying very loudly" for years, and that fixing the problem would require a mix of technical solutions, market pressure and government regulation. "There's no singular silver bullet for fixing all of this," she said. "I'm just glad that at least we are catching up a little bit now." US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved the settlement on Wednesday. It also covers the District of Columbia and US territories. Two states were not included: New Mexico, which won a separate case against Meta, and Florida, whose attorney general said the settlement's terms were not tough enough.