Meta’s $17 billion social media addiction settlement may be starting to reshape more than Facebook and Instagram. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel says Snapchat would be willing to consider a daily time limit for teens, putting another major platform on the path toward built-in restrictions instead of optional reminders.
Spiegel told the BBC that Snap has already discussed the idea internally and believes a maximum daily limit could be an important step for the wider industry. He stopped short of confirming that Snapchat will introduce one, though.
Meta’s settlement is raising the bar for teen accounts
Snapchat already offers Family Center, which gives parents some oversight over how their teenagers use the app. A default time limit would go considerably further because the restriction would already be switched on rather than waiting for a parent to find and enable it.
Meta recently agreed to take exactly that approach. Teen accounts on Facebook and Instagram are set to get a two-hour cumulative daily cap that requires parental permission to override. The company has also promised nighttime restrictions and limits on notifications during school hours and late at night.
More importantly, Meta has been pushing other social media companies to adopt similar rules. Some terms of its settlement become stricter if rival platforms introduce comparable protections, putting more pressure on the industry to settle on common standards for younger users.
Other platforms have already started capping teen use
Snap would not be the first company to take this route. TikTok already puts a 60-minute daily screen-time limit on accounts belonging to users under 18, although its default restriction is not as strict as the parental override system Meta has agreed to introduce. YouTube has introduced a hard cap for Shorts on supervised teen accounts as well. Parents can restrict time spent scrolling short-form videos without cutting off access to longer videos, music, or educational content.
The debate around those restrictions has also gained more weight from research. A study published earlier this year found that adolescents spending at least two hours a day on social media were more likely to report depressive symptoms and poorer wellbeing a year later. The researchers did not establish that social media directly caused those problems.
Snap has not committed to a daily limit or said when one could arrive. Spiegel’s comments do show that default restrictions are becoming a much more serious part of the conversation around how social platforms treat teenage users.
