For many US teenagers, Instagram and Facebook are about to behave less like endlessly open feeds and more like apps with a curfew. Meta’s agreement with a bipartisan group of attorneys general introduces a default two-hour daily limit across the two services for users under 18.
The cap is cumulative: time spent scrolling Facebook and Instagram counts toward the same two-hour total, and Meta says teens will need parental permission to turn it off. The agreement also includes a default midnight-to-6am block that prevents teens from posting or viewing Feed, Stories, Explore and Reels during those hours.
School hours get their own restriction. From 8am to 3pm, push notifications will be muted by default except for direct messages and account safety or security alerts. Teens will also see prompts after 15 minutes of continuous use and again when daily usage reaches 60 and 90 minutes.
Meta says most terms of the agreement will remain in place for 10 years. The company updated its announcement on August 27 to say the agreement had received judicial approval, turning what had initially been a pending settlement into a concrete set of obligations.
The rules are significant because they target product design rather than individual pieces of content. Instead of only deciding which posts a teenager can see, the system changes when the apps can be used, how long they can be used and when they are allowed to interrupt the school day.
Meta is publicly calling on TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar measures. Whether competitors follow may determine if these restrictions become a Meta-specific experiment or the beginning of a broader shift in how social platforms are designed for teenagers.
