Meta expands teen safety features to limit harmful content after $375M legal verdict

Meta Expands Safety Features for Teenagers

The changes, after Meta's legal losses in two child safety cases, are aimed at limiting harmful content shown to teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger. Meta unveiled new safety features on Tuesday to limit harmful content shown to teenagers on Instagram, Facebook and Messenger, its first major policy change since the company was found liable in March for harming a young woman with the design of its platforms. The features will limit how frequently teenagers are shown posts about topics like nutrition, weight lifting and anxiety in their feeds, Meta said, expanding on a broader teen safety effort it announced in October. That kind of content "can be helpful, but it should be balanced with other types of content rather than shown repeatedly," Meta said in a statement. "That's why we're testing ways to limit teens from seeing too many posts of this kind in one go." In October, Meta introduced a rating system for content on Instagram modeled after movie rating criteria; that system is now expanding to teenagers on Facebook and Messenger. Hundreds of millions of teenagers use Meta's apps, which also include WhatsApp, each day. The changes are part of the company's Teen Accounts program, created in 2024, which automatically made the accounts of teenage users private and gave parents more control over their children's accounts. Meta has faced scrutiny around child safety issues for over a decade, but is under increasing pressure from thousands of lawsuits filed by parents, state attorneys general and school districts -- two of which it recently lost. In March, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for harming a young woman with features like infinite scroll and beauty filters. That same month, a jury in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating state consumer protection laws, including enabling sexual exploitation, in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico's attorney general. Meta said on Tuesday that it had worked with Alice, a trust and safety organization, to measure how effective its policies are. The company said it had also had parents rate millions of pieces of content to help fine-tune its moderation system. In October, Meta had also unveiled safety policies around artificial intelligence chatbots amid growing concerns that the technology was harming young users. In January, Meta blocked teenagers from messaging Instagram's A.I. characters, which are chatbots that take on different personalities. Conversations between teenagers and the Meta A.I. chatbot now have the same kinds of content restrictions as Meta's movie ratings system.

Meta expands safety features to limit harmful content for teens

Meta is rolling out a new feature to limit harmful content shown to teenagers as part of a broader push to better protect kids online in the wake of two landmark verdicts against the company. The setting, called Limited Content, will limit specific types of content, such as posts about weightlifting, nutrition and anxiety coping strategies, the Instagram and Facebook parent company announced Tuesday. This content "can be helpful," but "should be balanced with other types of content rather than shown repeatedly," the company wrote in a release. This feature will apply in a users' Explore, Feed and Reels pages. The firm also announced its content settings for Teen Accounts will be expanded to its Instagram, Facebook and Messenger platforms around the world. Meta launched their Teen Account program in 2024; these accounts are private by default for users younger than 18. Users of teen accounts have to manually accept new followers and are only able to be messaged, tagged or mentioned by people they follow. The content settings also come with a default of hiding content deemed "inappropriate' for teens, and restricts teens' ability to view links to inappropriate content or chat with accounts that mostly share this type of content. It comes as the company faces scrutiny over its platforms' impacts on young users. While Congress has struggled to get most kids safety legislation across the finish line, safety groups have turned to the courts. A jury in New Mexico determined in a landmark ruling last month that Meta was liable in compromising children's safety online. The company was ordered to pay $375 million in damages for violating New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, which prohibits unfair, deceptive and misleading business ventures across the state. A bench trial kicked off Monday for a judge to review the New Mexico attorney general's requested protections for users under 18. Meta, alongside Google's YouTube, was also found liable by a jury, which determined that the companies were negligent in their design or operation of platforms. The company has rolled out other changes since, including the incorporation of artificial intelligence to better detect and remove users younger than 13 years old from its platforms. The firm said it is also partnering with Alice, an AI safety assessment firm, to assess its Teen Accounts settings.