Social-media giant Meta has agreed to pay up to US$18 billion to US states and make changes to its Facebook and Instagram platforms, settling a legal case about whether its technology harms kids' mental health. But how effective will these changes be in protecting children and teenagers' The 26 August settlement, which is legally binding only in the United States, is the latest in a series of global efforts to protect kids from harmful social-media use. In the coming months, US Facebook and Instagram users under 18 years old will see a flurry of new restrictions on their accounts, including a two-hour daily time limit and a block on using the platforms between midnight and 6 a.m. Some of the restrictions will require the permission of a parent or guardian to be switched off. Research is divided on whether social media harms teenagers' mental health, and whether changes such as the ones announced by Meta can even be enforced. Australia banned social-media use by children under 16 in December last year. But three months afterwards, a survey of almost 900 parents by the country's Internet safety regulator found that nearly seven in ten reported that their child still had accounts on a top social-media platform....

Devanathan will be based in Singapore and report to OpenAI's Asia-Pacific managing director, Kiran Mani. She will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption and partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia, OpenAI said. The executive is leaving Meta after more than a decade at the company, which has been the subject of growing scrutiny over issues such as online safety and content moderation. Devanathan was involved in the company's decision process in the country, a person familiar with the matter said. Following Devanathan's departure, Meta's India managing director, Arun Srinivas, will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company's vice president for Asia Pacific, a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Devanathan joined Meta in 2016 and held several leadership roles at the company, including leading its Asia Pacific gaming business, before being appointed vice president for India and Southeast Asia in June last year. Meta has faced growing pressure from Indian authorities in recent weeks. Earlier this month, the company apologized after Instagram mistakenly restricted a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July. The Indian government summoned Meta executives, including its chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, over the incident....

The lawsuit alleged that the social media giant knowingly designed platforms like Instagram and Facebook to addict children, despite knowing about the harms the platforms could pose to young users. The states also claimed that Meta knowingly collected data from children without parental knowledge, which violated the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Meta is framing its settlement as a call to action for YouTube and TikTok to adopt a set of protections for teens and controls for parents, which it developed in collaboration with 52 state attorneys general. Pending judicial approval, these protections will include the following terms, which will remain for 10 years: While Meta already defaults teens into private Facebook and Instagram accounts, the company says it will strengthen its work to prevent adults from finding, following, and interacting with teens. Meta has also vowed to strengthen its existing parental controls and improve its response times to harmful content reports from teens....

A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment. The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials 'R.K.C.,' had sued the social media companies for creating addictive platforms. It was one of thousands of similar lawsuits from teens, schools, and state attorneys general that had accused the big tech companies of knowingly creating addictive platforms. The precedent that would have been set by this lawsuit and others could have impacted how the companies build their apps, known for features that keep people engaged, like the infinite scroll and their continual buzz of notifications. The plaintiff's decision to drop the case follows Meta's loss in a New Mexico case earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over social media harms. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties after the company was found to have misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangered children....