For years Meta has answered concern about teenagers on its platforms with optional tools that parents rarely found and teens rarely kept on. The settlement of a US lawsuit over social-media addiction changes the approach: the limits will now be on by default, and some of them cannot be switched off by the teenager at all. The rules will be phased in over the next six months, with the age-verification changes taking up to a year.
The new defaults for under-18s
- Two hours a day across Instagram and Facebook. Parents can grant more time through parental controls; the teen cannot.
- A night lockout from midnight to 6am, when the apps will not open.
- No notifications from 8am to 3pm — school hours — so the phone in the bag stays quiet.
- Time warnings when a session runs long.
- Limited contact with unknown adults, tightening rules Meta has partly introduced already.
The feed changes are the bigger deal
The time limits will get the headlines, but the content rules go deeper into how the products work. Teens will see a general feed rather than one built from analysis of their interests and behaviour — the recommendation engine that critics blame for pulling vulnerable users into ever-narrower content. Like counts will be hidden on posts, removing the public scoreboard that researchers link to anxiety, and access to some appearance-altering filters will be restricted. Meta also says it is investing heavily in age-verification technology and will step up the detection and deletion of accounts belonging to children under 13.
Why now
None of this is voluntary. The changes are the price of settling litigation in the United States that accused Meta of building products it knew were addictive to minors, and they arrive as Australia, the UK and several US states impose or debate legal age limits for social media. Rules agreed in a courtroom tend to be implemented; rules promised in a press release tend to drift.
Will Bangladeshi teens get them?
Meta has not said whether the settlement terms apply outside the US. Historically the company has rolled such protections out globally, partly because maintaining two versions of a product is expensive and partly because regulators elsewhere ask why their children get less. Bangladesh has millions of under-18 Facebook users, a large share of whom registered with a false birth year, which is why the age-verification piece matters more here than the two-hour cap: a limit only works on accounts the platform knows belong to a teenager. For parents, the practical move remains the same as before — set up supervision in the app now, and correct the child’s real age in the account so the new defaults actually apply.
