It took nearly 14 years, but Meta is finally building a safer version of Instagram for 14-year-olds.

On Tuesday, the tech giant announced it will roll out a feature to automatically place teenaged users into a new type of Instagram account with beefed-up privacy settings and toggles for parental controls, among other measures. The move comes not-so-coincidentally as a pair of bills regulating online safety and privacy move further and further along Washington’s legislative pipeline.

Screen Teens

The walls have been closing in on Meta for a bit now. Just under a year ago, attorneys general in 41 states plus DC sued the company, alleging its platforms are harmful and addictive to children. Then, just a week ago, 42 state attorneys general endorsed a proposal to add warning labels to the platform from the US Surgeon General. But perhaps most distressing to Zuckerberg and friends are the pair of bills — the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the ​​Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), an update of the bill from 1998 — that passed through the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support back in July. The former would place a legal “duty of care” on online platforms to protect underage users from harm, while the latter would place a ban on targeted advertising to minors, and give kids and their parents far greater control on what types of data are collected. 

Both bills return to the House of Representatives on Wednesday for markups. For Meta, that makes it as good a time as any to finally follow through on years of promises to start self-policing its products:

• The new teen version will place all users under 16 into private Instagram accounts, which introduce parental control settings and place restrictions on recommended content. The users will have to accept new followers in order to interact with them as well.
• The app will ping teen users with a “daily limit” notification after an hour of usage, and automatically turn off notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. (which sound like excellent features for adult users too, if you ask us).

Panic Time: Whether the changes will cool some jets over in Congress remains an open question. And, of course, savvy teens will surely find loopholes and easy workarounds. Big Tech-focused newsletter Platformer reported this week that Meta C-suite players privately complain the backlash the firm faces is little more than moral panic. Still, the Meta empire is growing slightly more comfortable with self-policing; also on Tuesday, it announced it will be banning content from Russian-state media network RT on its platforms, just days after the Biden White House accused it of acting as an arm of Russia’s spy network. We’ll find out soon if lawmakers are sufficiently impressed with the last-minute efforts.

Corporate America says, “You go, girl… just not too fast.” 

Despite significant strides and increased senior leadership roles for women, it will be almost another 50 years before their representation matches their share of the US population, according to a report published Tuesday by McKinsey & Company and Lean In.

Glass Ceiling and Broken Rung

In 2015, women held only 17% of C-suite positions. Today, that number is just under 30%. However, progress in the corporate pipeline remains sluggish, particularly at lower levels. The glass ceiling still hampers women’s advancement, but Lean In highlights the “broken rung” issue — the barrier preventing women from being promoted to their first managerial roles:

• For every 100 men who were promoted to a manager position this year, only 81 women were given the same opportunity — a 7% decrease from 2023. That broken rung is even more of a barrier for Black and Latina women, who were given just 54 and 65 manager promotions, respectively, in 2024.
• As a result of those broken rungs, it will take another 22 years before white women reach workplace parity, and more than double that for women of color to do the same. 

What’s Causing the Gender Gap? While many companies have programs aimed at overcoming gender and race obstacles, fewer organizations prioritized these programs this year, the report reveals. Women are also more likely than men to field unwanted comments about their age, race, and disability, contributing to a sense of exclusion and making it harder for them to bring their whole selves to work.

A lack of career movement can also stem from obligations at home. 4 in 10 women with partners say they are responsible for most or all of the household work, and that number has grown since 2016, according to the report. Caretaking and homemaking responsibilities have also contributed to many women having fewer savings and a more limited grasp on financial literacy than men.

McKinsey and Lean In said businesses can build toward better gender equality by providing more flexible hours, managerial training programs, and health benefits like menopause support.

We’ll call it a pair of bank shots from Washington. 

Two US financial regulators told banks Tuesday to step up protections for consumers: in the first case, to keep their overdraft fees away from people’s money; in the second, to better keep track of where fintechs put people’s money.

So Not Over It

The first issue taken on Tuesday was overdraft fees, from which US banks have made more than $280 billion in revenue since 2000, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB said it found banks have been charging fees using “phantom opt-ins” — in other words, claiming they have consent from a customer to levy fees without any actual proof. The warning comes after, earlier this year, the CFPB introduced new rules that would cap overdraft fees, which average about $35, significantly reducing the toll on consumers. Pending approval, it will take effect in 2025.

The second issue is how the money held by fintech companies is accounted for, and is a little more complex:

• The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation proposed new rules that would require banks to keep track of the identity and account balances of people whose money it holds on behalf of fintech companies. While online apps and fintech firms offer competing services for holding money — like higher interest rates or microloans — they almost always put the money in a traditional bank, sometimes even in one big account.
• Earlier this year, when fintech middleman Synapse collapsed, thousands of Americans and businesses saw $160 million frozen — some of them were cut off from their money for months because it wasn’t immediately clear where it was. Hence, the FDIC’s desire to make sure that doesn’t happen again.

The Sound of Knuckles Cracking: Not to be outdone, US Justice Department sources told Bloomberg Tuesday that it’s escalating a criminal probe into how banks that lent to Archegos unwound $150 billion in bets placed by convicted fraudster Bill Hwang’s collapsed investment firm. Nobody said it was National Go Rough On Banks Day.