Changes to Facebook and Instagram after US case won’t affect Canada – yet

Canadian Facebook and Instagram users will not be impacted by a slew of changes Meta is introducing as part of a multi-billion-dollar settlement with dozens of US states, but some experts say there is a chance that could change.

Three experts told Cabin Radio the social media safeguards for teenagers – such as daily time limits on scrolling, disabling push notifications during school hours, and blocking scrolling in the nighttime – will not apply in Canada.

But Meta could introduce the teen safeguards in an attempt to avoid more stringent regulation in jurisdictions like Canada, the EU and Australia, said Mahtab Laghaei, a policy analyst at The Dais, in a video call. 

Twenty-nine US states accused Meta of harming children by designing Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to young people. To resolve the claims, Meta is introducing safeguards for teenage users and paying up to US $18 billion, although $5.3 billion of that will only be released if TikTok and YouTube introduce some safeguards and make a payment, according to a Meta news release. 

“There will be a third-party auditor that comes in and looks at whether Meta is doing what it should be doing or not, but there’s no creation of a regulator, and so this is pretty ad hoc,” said Evan Light, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, in a video call.

“For me, it doesn’t really have any really enduring quality,” Light said, adding that the money Meta agreed to pay out is a small fraction of the sum for which the states sued them, so they are “getting off light.”

The agreement specifically excludes international jurisdictions and US states that were not part of it, so anything beyond that is outside the scope of the settlement, said Ebrahim Bagheri, a professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information, in a phone interview.

Safeguards for teenage use under the settlement include:

• a two-hour daily time limit, cumulative between Facebook and Instagram;
• night access mode from 12am to 6am blocks teens from posting or viewing their Facebook or Instagram feed, stories, explore page, or reels. Users can still access messaging functions;
• “school mode” mutes notifications between 8am and 3pm except for direct messages and account security alerts;
• teens will get periodic reminders that they can switch to a non-algorithmic feed;
• teens are blocked from using cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters;
• the number of likes and reactions to posts are to be hidden; and
• teens will be prompted every 15 minutes of continuous scrolling to encourage intentional social media use.

Many of those features can be turned off with a parent’s permission.

‘Excuse to avoid this bigger conversation’

Right now, the settlement’s amendments to how teens can use the platform don’t change anything for Canadians perusing Facebook and Instagram, according to Light, Bagheri and Laghaei. 

It is possible Meta will decide, of its own volition, to expand the teen safeguards to other jurisdictions, including Canada, but at this stage it is not clear whether Meta plans to do so, Bagheri and Laghaei said. 

Meta may use these measures to “water down” broader attempts to regulate social media platforms, said Laghaei, a policy analyst at The Dais. The Dais is a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University that focuses on the intersection of technology, education and democracy. 

She suggested Meta could take the approach of: “Look, we’re doing this everywhere. That is why we don’t need any other platform regulation. These promises that we’ve made here are enough.”

That would form “an excuse to avoid this bigger conversation and bigger method of accountability that we’re trying to push in Canada,” Laghaei said.

Canada’s federal government introduced legislation called the Safe Social Media Act in June. The proposed law still needs to be studied by the House of Commons and the Senate but, if passed, it would ban social media for users under 16 years old and impose a “duty to protect children” for social media and AI chatbot companies. This core duty would require these companies to implement design features to make their services safer for children. 

Light could maybe envision the EU getting together with the United States and Canada to regulate social media like Meta but, he said, the US has taken a “hands off” approach to regulating social media and artificial intelligence.

Unless you have regulation at a multinational scale, “it’s going to be fairly piecemeal and not really terribly functional,” said Light.

Because the changes only apply to the 29 states named in the lawsuit, social media users can circumvent restrictions in their home state by using VPNs and other workarounds, Light noted.

Access to data

Many individual and class action lawsuits against social media companies, including Meta, are playing out in Canada.

Of those, most are in the very early stages and nowhere near settling, said Darryl Singer, a partner and the head of class action at Diamond and Diamond Lawyers, in a phone interview.

Singer’s firm is involved in a number of class action suits related to social media companies and online gambling, he said.

Meta’s decision to settle with the 29 states doesn’t necessarily mean the company will be willing to settle in Canada, Singer cautioned. However, he said two US court rulings from March could be helpful with advancing his class action lawsuits. 

When considering whether to expand the teen safeguards to other jurisdictions, Meta will have to decide whether the reputational risk of not rolling this out globally is worth the revenue they get from not implementing these changes, Bagheri said.

“There’s a trade-off for Meta to figure out, and there’s an actual economic calculation to it, and we’ll have to wait and see how Meta does that calculation, and where they land.”

Limiting teenagers to two hours of screen time also substantially limits the amount of advertisements Meta can show them, and this will be a major factor in their calculations, Bagheri and Light said.

Looking ahead, it will be important to figure out whether all these changes to protect teenagers are actually effective, Laghaei and Bagheri emphasized.

For example, to understand whether restrictions on nighttime use actually create positive outcomes for teenagers, Meta would have to share its data with lawmakers and authorities, Bagheri said.

“If you don’t have access to that data, it becomes just shooting in the dark,” Bagheri said.