Yet another article written by Mike Masnick, tech reporter with a huge conflict of interest (he's a Director at Bluesky, a social network).

The classic case with Meta is that many of its efforts to study how to make its platforms safer were used against the company as proof that “they knew!” their platforms were unsafe!

The lesson for the rest of the tech industry is grim and unambiguous: never study whether your own platform is causing harm. The mere existence of the research will be turned into Exhibit A that “they knew,” both in the court of public opinion and in actual courts.

What strange framing.

Meta wasn't learning about safety out of the kindness of their hearts. They were identifying harmful features and keeping them. They were identifying addictive features and focusing on building them.

We don't know this because Meta wanted us to know. It's whistleblowers who testified about it.

there are some oddly specific requirements:

Meta SMPs will disable Teen Users from applying Cosmetic Procedure Filters to their content.

The agreement clarifies that this means:

… any digital filter or augmented reality (AR) effect that distorts, sculpts, redefines, or idealizes a user’s face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup techniques.

And, sure, I can understand why such content might be unhealthy for teens. But it is, in fact, Constitutionally-protected speech.

This is such a reach. The best argument Mike can give in favor of face filters is that they're free speech, apparently, which is dubious (we've already decided that under-13s don't get any social media "speech" at all). Maybe Mike is in favor of removing that caveat too.

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.

No they didn’t. It’s to be paid over 10 years

“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.

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.

Children benefit from online anonymity. Destroying their anonymity harms children.

Facebook will die one day. The younger gens don’t want to use it. At all.

I’d bet dollars to donuts that if someone developed a viable place for people to work out where and how to meet, Facebook usage would drop like a rock among those older gens who still use it.

Beats parenting.

The day I take any advice from Meta is the day I'd close my business for good.

Notably absent afaik: More moderators to moderate content

Meta can do whatever they want with their use policy. The government that hosts the business writes the rules.

Such an absolute failure by the AGs, they made the situation worse with that deal

As noted, we already know that some of these things are directly harmful. Age assurance is a privacy nightmare. Enshrining it as the industry standard means the end of meaningful online anonymity, and it “forces” Meta to collect more data about all of us — including adults — while handing the states a pipeline to that data for whatever else they decide it’s useful for.

...

This is also a perfect example of the kind of standard that only a giant can meet. A six-hour turnaround on 90% of reports is achievable when you have thousands of trust & safety staff and a decade of tooling. For a startup with four employees and a Discord server, it’s a fantasy — and now it’s the benchmark against which every AG will measure them.

...

But for all the people “celebrating” this as a win “against” Meta, you’ve been fooled. Meta just cut a deal to put itself in charge of how social media works going forward. As Justin Maurer wrote on Bluesky, this is Meta taking a “please regulate me Daddy” approach to the government, and getting exactly what it really has been asking for.

We still don’t have any actual evidence that this will help anyone, let alone every kid. The state AGs didn’t have to prove how this would help kids. Meta didn’t have to prove it. The judge won’t be asked to. It’s just taken on faith. Meta offered this up, the AGs okayed it… and it all becomes a grand experiment on kids.

Real fuckin bad news