That familiar “one more minute” standoff may soon get a sturdier referee on Instagram and Facebook.
“The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said after a judge approved the company’s sweeping new agreement with a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general.
Meta will place users under 18 in participating US states and territories under a default two-hour daily limit across Instagram and Facebook. Time spent scrolling on both apps — and on multiple accounts Meta connects to the same teen — will count toward one combined total, and teens will need a parent’s permission to disable the limit.
The agreement also builds a six-hour overnight boundary into the apps. From midnight to 6 a.m., teens will not be able to post or view Feed, Stories, Explore or Reels, though direct messages will remain available so they can contact family and friends.
During school hours, Meta will mute most notifications from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., with exceptions for direct messages and account safety alerts. The apps will also interrupt the endless scroll with prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous use, then send additional reminders when a teen’s daily use reaches 60 and 90 minutes.
Some changes tackle the quieter pressures baked into social media. Like and reaction counts will disappear for teens by default, while cosmetic-surgery and extreme-makeup filters will be blocked. Teens may choose a non-algorithmic feed or turn off autoplay, and parents using supervision tools can require those settings.
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Parents will gain more visibility, too. Meta plans to notify them when a supervised teen links a second account, interacts with a potentially suspicious account or tries to weaken protective settings. The company also agreed to strengthen age-detection technology so children under 13 can be removed and 13- to 17-year-olds who enter an adult birthday can still receive teen protections.
The changes come from a court-approved settlement of a 2023 lawsuit by state attorneys general. The states alleged that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram features to encourage compulsive use among young people and collected data from some children under 13 without parental consent; Meta disputed those claims, and the agreement resolves them without a final adjudication of fact or law. Most provisions must remain in place for 10 years, although the daily and overnight limits begin with a five-year commitment.
These are meaningful guardrails, but they do not turn Instagram into a risk-free space overnight.
“There’s no singular silver bullet for fixing all of this,” said Yaël Eisenstat, director of policy and impact for the Cybersafety Research Center. “I’m just glad that at least we are catching up a little bit now.”
That caution matters because screen time is only part of the picture. A US Surgeon General’s advisory says young people who spend more than three hours a day on social media face twice the risk of mental health problems such as symptoms of depression and anxiety, while also acknowledging gaps in researchers’ understanding of social media’s full effects.
The American Psychological Association recommends pairing limits and boundaries with ongoing parent-child discussion and coaching. That is the piece no setting can automate: Parents still need to ask what their children see, who contacts them and how the experience shapes their sleep, mood and relationships.
Families do not have to wait for every feature to arrive. They can review supervision settings together, set phone-free hours and talk honestly about why a healthy boundary is not punishment. Meta’s new controls may provide useful backup, but wise, involved parenting remains the strongest safeguard a child has.
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