Recently, I joined a briefing Meta hosted for parent and child-safety advocates on its new agreement with a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general. Antigone Davis, Meta’s global head of safety, walked through what will change on Instagram and Facebook for teenagers, and she was candid about the agreement’s limits. One line stayed with me. Teens, she said, “move fluidly across dozens of apps in a day,” and if you put a time limit on Instagram and nowhere else, “they’ll literally just go to TikTok or to YouTube.”
She’s right. It is an argument I’ve carried to Trenton and Capitol Hill as a PTA advocate: safeguards that stop at one company don’t protect kids across the whole ecosystem. So here is a parent’s honest read of the agreement: what it does, what it leaves undone, and what families across our region, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, can do now.
What the agreement actually does
On August 26, in the second week of a federal trial in Oakland, Meta settled with attorneys general from 47 states, the District of Columbia, and three territories; Texas struck a parallel deal the same day, bringing the total to 52. Nationally, the deal is worth up to $17.1 billion (Meta puts it near $18 billion with Texas), with roughly 30 percent held back unless TikTok and YouTube both adopt similar protections, including a one-hour daily limit, and pay matching amounts. All three of our states signed on. New Jersey’s Attorney General, Jennifer Davenport, helped lead the case; over the deal’s ten-year term, New Jersey will receive at least $525 million, New York at least $819 million and Pennsylvania at least $516 million, all earmarked for youth mental health and school programs. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers approved the consent judgment the same day.
The money will get the headlines; the design changes matter more to families. For every Instagram and Facebook account Meta identifies as a 13- to 17-year-old’s in a participating state, the following becomes the default:
- A two-hour daily time limit across Instagram and Facebook combined, which a teen can turn off only with a linked parent’s permission.
- A “night mode” that blocks the apps from midnight to 6 a.m., and a “school mode” that mutes notifications from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on school days.
- Prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous use, plus a nudge at 60 and 90 minutes of daily use.
- Like counts hidden, cosmetic-surgery and extreme makeup filters blocked, and stricter age-appropriate content settings. The agreement’s definition of age-inappropriate content specifically includes gambling.
- The option of a chronological, non-algorithmic feed and the ability to turn off autoplay, both of which a parent can require.
- New alerts for linked parents when a teen first messages an adult, opens a secondary account, or repeatedly searches for suicide, self-harm, or eating-disorder content.
- Stronger age assurance, including new technology to find under-13 accounts.
Direct messaging is exempt so teens can stay in touch with friends and family. Parents don’t have to do anything to receive these defaults; most must be in place within six months, and the age-assurance work can take up to a year.
What it doesn’t do
A few caveats. First, the agreement covers two apps. Pew found that about nine in ten teens use YouTube and roughly six in ten use TikTok, and the two-hour limit reaches neither, which is why Meta is pressing both to match it. Second, the algorithmic feed remains the default. Fairplay’s Josh Golin said he was “disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms,” and protective settings only help if someone changes them. Third, all of this depends on Meta knowing who is a teen. A 14-year-old who signed up with an adult birthday may see none of it until Meta’s age models catch up. I have watched my own third-grader breeze past the age field while setting up a game account, not to deceive anyone, but because he didn’t think it mattered. That is why age assurance belongs at the app-store and device level, verified once and shared privately with every app. And remember: this is a deal between Meta and state governments; it admits no liability and doesn’t resolve the claims of individual families and school districts whose cases continue in the same courthouse.
What’s coming next
In Washington, the Senate Commerce Committee advanced the Kids Online Safety Act (S. 1748) on August 5 with its “duty of care“, the requirement that platforms prevent and mitigate specific harms to minors, intact, and the Senate passed COPPA 2.0 (S. 836) by unanimous consent in March. The House went another way: its KIDS Act (H.R. 7757) passed 267–117 on June 29 without the duty of care, and the two chambers must reconcile before this Congress ends in January. When our New Jersey PTA delegation met with our congressional offices in March for National PTA’s Capitol Hill Day, passing the Senate versions of KOSA and COPPA 2.0 was one of our asks, and the case for a federal law has only grown since.
I’ll be candid, though, about one provision where my own view is more measured than that of some of my fellow advocates. I understand why the duty of care is the centerpiece of the Senate bill. But the House package, whatever its gaps, is the vehicle most likely to attract the bipartisan votes an actual law requires. A strong bill with real protections, meaning privacy by default, an end to targeted advertising to kids, meaningful parental tools, and age assurance at the store level, should not be hamstrung over this one provision. A settlement binds one company for ten years; a statute binds everyone.
The App Store Accountability Act, which would make app stores, not individual apps, verify age and obtain a parent’s approval before a child downloads anything, has cleared the House Energy and Commerce Committee (H.R. 3149). Texas’s version is already being enforced after the Supreme Court declined in July to reinstate a lower-court order blocking it while the appeal proceeds. As I argued in a NorthJersey.com op-ed last fall, a state-by-state patchwork can’t hold when kids defeat geography with a VPN in minutes; we need one national standard.
Closer to home, the three states where our firm practices have each moved faster than Washington, in different ways. New York got there first on phones: its statewide bell-to-bell smartphone rule has been in place since last school year, and its SAFE for Kids Act, whose final rules the Attorney General announced in July, will require parental consent before platforms serve minors algorithmic feeds or overnight notifications. New Jersey followed this fall: the state’s new school cellphone law, often called the phone-free schools law, took effect this school year with bell-to-bell restrictions on non-academic use, a policy nearly four in five respondents supported in the New Jersey PTA’s first Community Voice Survey this winter. And on August 11, Governor Sherrill signed the New Jersey Kids Code Act, which from September 2027 will require the highest privacy settings by default for minors, quiet notifications overnight and during school hours, no algorithmic recommendations built from a child’s data unless the child asks, hidden like counts and, unusually, a private right of action for injured children and their parents. Pennsylvania is moving through its Attorney General and its legislature: Dave Sunday sued TikTok in August over its 13+ app-store rating and then Snap, and in Harrisburg both chambers have passed the bell-to-bell school phone bills Governor Shapiro asked for but have yet to agree on a final version.
The gambling problem hiding inside the games
One item on that list of age-inappropriate content deserves its own paragraph: gambling. Meta’s agreement requires the company to limit teens’ exposure to gambling content on Instagram and Facebook and keep reducing it over time. It does nothing about the sportsbook a 16-year-old reaches with a parent’s saved credit card, the “social casino” app rated for teens, or the game that pays out randomized rewards in a loop indistinguishable from a slot machine. In the physical world, a minor cannot walk onto a casino floor. Online, the access controls are often thinner than the paywall. That matters everywhere, but especially here: all three of our states have legal mobile sports betting, New Jersey and Pennsylvania also allow online casino play, and the advertising follows our kids through every Eagles, Giants and Phillies broadcast. Regulators are starting to notice. On Tuesday, New York’s Attorney General secured $8 million from the operator of Chumba Casino, Global Poker, and LuckyLand Slots, “sweepstakes casinos,” she said, which operated as unregulated gambling and in which some players lost tens of thousands of dollars.
At Locks Law Firm, we are actively representing families in underage gambling lawsuits, and the patterns repeat: children who create accounts with false birthdates, use a parent’s card, or find gambling features hidden inside mobile games, social casinos, and fantasy platforms, sometimes losing thousands of dollars before an adult notices. The industry’s favorite defense is that determined kids will always find a way around age checks. I don’t accept it: a platform that can track a microtransaction to the penny can verify the age of the person making it. Companies cannot build a digital casino, leave the back door unlocked, and then blame the children who wander inside.
Safety isn’t only digital this fall
Fall sports are underway, and a two-hour screen limit means little if we aren’t equally serious about the field. Every state and the District of Columbia has a youth-sports concussion law that generally requires pulling a player suspected of a concussion and getting medical clearance before a return to play; far fewer schools have Return to Learn protocols, which is why National PTA adopted a resolution last year urging schools to give concussed students individualized academic-recovery plans. Ask your athletic director how your school handles both, and make sure your child’s helmet and equipment are properly fitted and certified.
Our firm has worked on this issue for more than a decade. Gene Locks served as class counsel in the NFL Concussion Settlement, and Locks Law Firm represents more than 1,500 retired players under an uncapped settlement that has approved more than $1.7 billion in monetary awards to date. That litigation forced a public reckoning with what youth-sports parents should already assume: repeated head impacts carry lifelong consequences.
What parents can do this week
Link your account through Meta’s supervision tools, since only a linked parent can adjust the new defaults, and linking unlocks the new alerts. Check the birthdate on every account your child holds, on Instagram, gaming platforms, and app stores, because a wrong age is how a child slips out of every protective default at once. Turn on the chronological feed and turn off autoplay. Put a passcode on in-app purchases and remove saved payment methods from devices your kids use. Talk with your teen about sports betting and casino-style games the way you would talk about alcohol. And read your school’s phone policy and concussion protocol before you need them.
Then use the tools that already exist, in a way that fits your child’s age. Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Family Link handle app approvals and time limits at the device level. For a fuller picture, I think Bark is one of the stronger platforms: rather than handing you every message, it scans texts, email, browsers, and more than 30 apps for signs of trouble, from bullying and predatory contact to self-harm, and alerts you only when something warrants a conversation, alongside screen-time schedules and web filtering. Whatever you choose, monitoring should be transparent and age-appropriate; a nine-year-old and a sixteen-year-old need different oversight, and both should know it exists. Neither I nor the firm has any relationship with Bark.
Antigone Davis closed the briefing by calling the agreement “an important step, but it’s not the end of the work,” and “a shared responsibility.” On that, Meta and the parents suing it agree. For those of us who advocate for children, in Trenton, Harrisburg and Albany, in Washington, at school board meetings and, when it comes to that, in court, the job now is to make the standard set on August 26 the floor for every app our kids use, not the ceiling.
About The Author
Leon Carelli is Chief Technology Officer at Locks Law Firm, where he has led the firm’s technology, e-discovery, and information-security operations since 2013 and trains its legal teams on the secure, ethical use of AI. He serves as Vice President of Advocacy for the New Jersey PTA and President of the Southampton Township Board of Education, and he is a member of the Forbes Technology Council. A parent of five, he writes and speaks on technology policy and child safety; his commentary on the App Store Accountability Act appeared in NorthJersey.com. The views expressed are his own. Titles are for identification only; he does not speak for the New Jersey PTA or the Southampton Township Board of Education.
