My five takeaways from the Meta settlement

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

After a week off last week and a guest contribution prior to that, I'm back and looking at — what else — the Meta settlement and what it could mean for the T&S industry. In some ways, it's too early to say but I've tried to read the tea leaves as much as possible.

I know folks have views on this, so drop me a line with how you're seeing the settlement, almost a week out from its announcement. And if you happen to be at Marketplace Risk in New York in a few weeks, hit reply and we can chat in person! — Alice

Did a US court just create a new normal for platform design?

By now, most EiM readers will know about how Meta settled with 52 state and territory attorneys general for up to $18 billion (EiM #349), eight days into a trial over the design of its apps for young users.

Like you, I've been sifting through the reactions of legal, constitutional and safety experts since the announcement and, while there's plenty to like about safety finally being treated as a design decision rather than an afterthought, it's left me concerned about how much is being decided by one company's litigation strategy.

Here are five things that I'm taking from the settlement and which Trust & Safety teams should be thinking about...

Treat these as new de facto industry standards

The settlement included a specific set of platform design changes for teens, including a two-hour time limit, preventing use at night and during school hours, a non-algorithmic feed option and others. Techdirt's Mike Masnick goes into more detail on these concessions and, notably, how there's little robust evidence that they work in the wild.

The key point — which is missing or buried from a lot of coverage — is that ~$5B of the settlement is contingent on whether the Attorneys General extract "substantively equivalent obligations" from TikTok, YouTube and Snap. And it means that, if those platforms comply, it will essentially set a precedent for the entire industry — even if it isn't a legal one.

So what does that mean? While some of these features are simple, in aggregate they represent a significant burden for any company to design, build and launch. Meta has the resource to do so — which is why it agreed to them — but adhering to this newly agreed "industry best practice" could disproportionately affect smaller platforms and new players that want to compete for the same teen audience but lacks the headcount or legal muscle to weather it when it goes wrong. That's not good for user choice.

Expect age assurance to become table stakes

Every design obligation in the deal presumes that a platform can tell who's under 18, which requires age assurance. As Stanford's Daphne Keller points out, the standard for best practice here is set by age assurance vendors, and according to the US's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the best provider still misbuckets more than a quarter of 13–16-year-olds.

And while NIST doesn't measure the risk of spoofing, we know that age assurance is highly gameable as demonstrated by reports of users using characters from well-known computer games or wearing a fake moustache.

That is the technology that this settlement — and in fairness, government-approved regulation around the world — is ushering in. Could it be the final nail in the coffin for an open, non-age-gated web? It certainly feels like that.

Prepare for "age-appropriate" content tiers

The settlement sees Meta create age-appropriateness tiers "inspired by" movie ratings, which is deeply ironic for two reasons.

The first is that the Motion Picture Association — which rates films in the United States — told Meta to stop using PG-13 to refer to Instagram teen account content because it could erode trust in its movie ratings system. Secondly, there are numerous incidents of Meta blocking or hiding content under its “sensitive content” policy, including adverts promoting climate change stories and LGBTQ+ hashtags. In the case of the latter, the company said it was a mistake and fixed the issue but there's no reason for it to go any differently next time.

Regardless of Meta's track record in the past, the settlement may lead to a broader acceptance or indeed expectation of curating content based on age appropriateness. This shift would open (or reopen) up a whole can of worms about what "appropriate" even means and lead to questions like: should Meta be able to restrict info on reproductive health information? What if Wikipedia didn't carry factual articles on parts of the human body?

No-one involved in negotiating the settlement had to argue that hard question of where legitimate information ends and "inappropriate" begins. So the platform with the worst track record gets to.