Report from Engadget
In Brief – TikTok has agreed to make changes to its app and pay Alabama at least $100 million to settle a lawsuit by the state that alleged that the app was deliberately designed to keep children and teenagers addicted to social media. The settlement comes just before the lawsuit was scheduled to go to trial and is TikTok’s first settlement with a state over their social media addiction claims. Alabama and more than a dozen other states sued TikTok and its developer, Chinese company ByteDance, last year. Following the model set out by Meta’s recent settlement agreement with the coalition of 47 state attorneys general, TikTok has agreed to introduce a series of platform changes intended to improve teen safety, including a two-hour daily time limit, additional parental controls allowing them to impose even shorter time limits, restrictions on unlimited scrolling and overnight access, a ban on beauty filters for younger users, and the provision of a non-personalized content feed option. Meta agreed to pay the state coalition at least $12 billion, a figure that could reach $18 billion, while TikTok’s payment to Alabama could reach $300 million if they do not implement the platform changes.
Context – We thought the Meta settlement was primarily about advancing a process to push the biggest social media platforms to make some changes without the First Amendment headaches that come from the government telling speech platforms how to operate. Several states have enacted laws regulating a similar set of platform features that the recent Meta and TikTok settlements address. Most have been blocked by federal judges for violating the First Amendment, although that trend has wavered recently in some appeals courts. The financial side of the Meta settlement was not immense given the state claims, and the TikTok agreement doesn’t seem so either. We expect TikTok to reach more settlements, and Snap to come around as well. YouTube appears to be taking a harder line. And they will all soon be working to get regulators in the EU, UK and other countries to agree to a similar set of changes.