Meta's landmark settlement with a coalition of US states puts age assurance at the centre of the company's latest child-safety measures, with under-18 users on Facebook and Instagram set to face default limits on screen time, night-time access and notifications.
The deal, approved by a judge, requires a two-hour daily limit, a midnight to 6 am block, and muted notifications between 8 am and 3 pm. Meta will also strengthen technology to identify users aged 13-17 even when they provide an adult birthday.
The agreement follows years of litigation in the US over the impact of social media on children, including concerns around screen time, mental wellbeing and potentially addictive product design. Meta said the measures are intended to give parents greater control and called for TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar protections, arguing that teenagers move between multiple apps. Meta's Chief Legal Officer CJ Mahoney described the framework as a new set of rules governing teens' use of social media and said its success depended on industry-wide adoption.
The US framework also goes beyond time limits. Teenagers will be able to choose a non-algorithmic feed, turn off autoplay and have like counts hidden by default. Meta will strengthen parental controls and restrictions on unwanted contact from adults. The company will also establish an independent research foundation and an auditor to assess compliance.
Scrutiny in India over child sexual abuse material
For India, the US measures come as Meta faces government scrutiny over child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and prepares to comply with the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) framework. The two regimes address different aspects of child safety.
"The Indian DPDP framework is focused on privacy-related risks and harms," said Aparajita Bharti, the founding partner of The Quantum Hub (TQH), a research firm in Delhi.
The law requires verifiable parental consent before processing children's personal data and prohibits targeted advertising and behavioural monitoring and profiling of children.
"Additional obligations arise under the DPDPA for collecting children's information, requiring parental verification," said Shruti Narayan, a Delhi-based lawyer. "The issue is how to ensure that children are safe online - particularly from harmful and addictive content - while not collecting more information than is necessary."
The DPDP framework, however, does not specifically regulate harms associated with social media addiction, mental wellbeing or screen time. Those concerns are more directly reflected in the US settlement, which imposes product-level restrictions on how teenagers use Meta's platforms.
India is also dealing with a separate child-safety issue: CSAM. The government has recently sought action from social media platforms over the circulation and promotion of such material, bringing Meta's content moderation and detection systems under scrutiny. This sits alongside the intermediary due diligence requirements under the IT Rules.
The differences between the two regulatory approaches also mean that Meta's US measures cannot simply be replicated in India, Bharti said.
"Copying pasting the same safety features that Meta has offered in the US across platforms in India also is not practical," she said. "We have a different context."
For instance, Meta's US agreement requires notifications to be muted during school hours. "The feature offered by Meta in the US about no notifications in school time is mostly irrelevant in the Indian context as most schools here anyway do not allow phones to be carried in schools," Bharti said.
Device usage is another difference. "We also have high shared device usage among teens, so perhaps safety by design principles also needs to take that into account here," she said.
That makes age assurance particularly relevant to India's DPDP compliance. A platform must be able to establish whether a user is a child to determine whether parental consent and other child-specific restrictions apply. But verifying age can itself require processing personal information.
"The solution cannot be through age verification alone. Age verification can be bypassed," Narayan said. She added that Meta should increase transparency into its content-reviewing mechanisms and how much data is collected by its algorithms, alongside greater access for researchers who can provide neutral assessments of the impact of social media.
WhatsApp Testing Voluntary Age-Declaration Mechanism
Meta's WhatsApp has already begun testing a voluntary age-declaration mechanism in India, asking some users to provide their date of birth. The company has said it is testing privacy-protective ways for users to confirm their age ahead of laws such as the DPDP Act. The test is not currently a mandatory identity-verification requirement.
The distinction is significant because self-declared age does not necessarily establish a user's actual age. Meta's US settlement explicitly requires stronger technology to identify teenagers who provide an adult birthday.
Narayan said child safety also needs to account for children's legitimate use of the internet. "Keeping children safe includes giving them access to the internet and online resources for education, health, and emergency services," she said.
"The DPDPA and the DPDP Rules can help by requiring that when children's data is collected, it is kept safe and is not used for unnecessary advertising or other purposes," she said.
Bharti said India should build its own evidence base before prescribing product-level measures. "The Indian government should invest in collecting its own evidence and data on potential harms and risks faced by children online," she said, and develop a principles-based "wellbeing by design framework" that platforms can apply to the Indian context.
"A flurry of regulation/litigation around the world around social media harms against the children has opened up space for regulators and platforms to find middle ground and incorporate safety by design in their product features," she said.
For Meta, the emerging challenge in India is therefore twofold: comply with stricter obligations around children's data and CSAM while adapting safety measures developed in other markets to Indian patterns of device use, schooling and online behaviour.
