The Company that Cried Teen Safety

Meta settled on kids safety cases; now what?

As part of a landmark settlement with 47 Attorneys General on August 26th, Meta agreed to implement a number of design changes meant to make their platforms safer for children. Many of the promises the company makes in the new agreement are good ones. However, this is only the most recent in a line of commitments Meta has made to improve the safety of its products. While Meta has used the moment to advertise their stated commitment to kids safety, the real moment to cheer will be when the public can see that these promises have been fulfilled.

We always welcome new safety commitments from any social media company. However, for years Meta has promised they keep kids safe; they have touted their design features, product and policy changes, and parental tools. But our own research and the evidence in recent cases in New Mexico and Los Angeles have proven that the reality has not matched their repeated promises to the public.

One of the things we do at Cybersafety Research Center (CRC) is expose how online systems truly work, including auditing social media tools that are advertised as protecting children. In our most recent report auditing Instagram’s advertised child safety features, we found that nearly 66% of features failed (19 of 29 tested). This is why it is critical that independent researchers continue to do the work of verifying, testing, and publicly reporting on Meta’s (and other companies’) stated safety commitments. 

There are a number of potentially positive design and feature changes in the settlement agreement, but the big question will be how to measure both the implementation of those features and the effects on young users. We will continue to do our job of measuring product safety, the efficacy of safety features, and comparing our findings to what the companies publicly promise. In our last report, we proposed a new framework to evaluate youth safety tools, but we acknowledge that much more work is needed to develop comprehensive safety standards for social media products, particularly ones used by children. These standards cannot be defined solely by the companies themselves; independent research is a critical component to getting this right.

Additionally, a major reason that past promises of improved safety have not borne sufficient fruit is because the public has not had enough information to actually hold companies to the promises they make. One key take-away from these cases is that the companies should not be left to grade their own homework. That’s why commitments to transparency and researcher access are also key to keeping the public informed and holding companies accountable for the promises they make. 

Now that courts have established that harmful design can in fact injure people, we intend to not only keep them accountable for their commitments, but also invest in the next question: what safer alternative designs look like, and how empirical research can define and validate them.