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Despite years of congressional hearings, lawsuits, academic research, whistleblowers and testimony from parents and teenagers about the dangers of Instagram, Meta’s wildly popular app has failed to protect children from harm, with woefully ineffective” safety measures, according to a new report from former employee and whistleblower Arturo Bejar and four nonprofit groups. Metas efforts at addressing teen safety and mental health on its platforms have long been met with criticism that the changes dont go far enough. Now, the report published Thursday, from Bejar, the Cybersecurity For Democracy at New York University and Northeastern University, the Molly Rose Foundation, Fairplay and ParentsSOS, claims Meta has chosen not to take real steps to address safety concerns, opting instead for splashy headlines about new tools for parents and Instagram Teen Accounts for underage users. Meta said the report misrepresents its efforts on teen safety. The report evaluated 47 of Meta’s 53 safety features for teens on Instagram, and found that the majority of them are either no longer available or ineffective. Others reduced harm, but came with some “notable limitations, while only eight tools worked as intended with no limitations. The report’s focus was on Instagram’s design, not content moderation. This distinction is critical because social media platforms and their defenders often conflate efforts to improve platform design with censorship, the report says. However, assessing safety tools and calling out Meta when these tools do not work as promised, has nothing to do with free speech. Holding Meta accountable for deceiving young people and parents about how safe Instagram really is, is not a free speech issue. Meta called the report misleading, dangerously speculative and said it undermines the important conversation about teen safety. This report repeatedly misrepresents our efforts to empower parents and protect teens, misstating how our safety tools work and how millions of parents and teens are using them today. Teen Accounts lead the industry because they provide automatic safety protections and straightforward parental controls, Meta said. “The reality is teens who were placed into these protections saw less sensitive content, experienced less unwanted contact, and spent less time on Instagram at night. Parents also have robust tools at their fingertips, from limiting usage to monitoring interactions. Well continue improving our tools, and we welcome constructive feedback but this report is not that. Meta has not disclosed what percentage of parents use its parental control tools. Such features can be useful for families in which parents are already involved in their childs online life and activities, but experts say thats not the reality for many people. New Mexico Attorney General Raśl Torrez who has filed a lawsuit against Meta claiming it fails to protect children from predators said it is unfortunate that Meta is doubling down on its efforts to persuade parents and children that Metas platforms are saferather than making sure that its platforms are actually safe. The authors created teen test accounts as well as malicious adult and teen accounts that would attempt to interact with these accounts in order to evaluate Instagram’s safeguards. For instance, while Meta has sought to limit adult strangers from contacting underage users on its app, adults can still communicate with minors through many features that are inherent in Instagrams design, the report says. In many cases, adult strangers were recommended to the minor account by Instagrams features such as reels and people to follow.” Most significantly, when a minor experiences unwanted sexual advances or inappropriate contact, Metas own product design inexplicably does not include any effective way for the teen to let the company know of the unwanted advance, the report says. Instagram also pushes its disappearing messages feature to teenagers with an animated reward as an incentive to use it. Disappearing messages can be dangerous for minors and are used for drug sales and grooming, and leave the minor account with no recourse, according to the report. Another safety feature, which is supposed to hide or filter out common offensive words and phrases in order to prevent harassment, was also found to be largely ineffective. Grossly offensive and misogynistic phrases were among the terms that we were freely able to send from one Teen Account to another, the report says. For example, a message that encouraged the recipient to kill themselves and contained a vulgar term for women was not filtered and had no warnings applied to it. Meta says the tool was never intended to filter all messages, only message requests. The company expanded its teen accounts on Thursday to users worldwide. As it sought to add safeguards for teens, Meta has also promised it wouldn’t show inappropriate content to teens, such as posts about self-harm, eating disorders or suicide. The report found that its teen avatars were nonetheless recommended age-inappropriate sexual content, including graphic sexual descriptions, the use of cartoons to describe demeaning sexual acts, and brief displays of nudity. We were also algorithmically recommended a range of violent and disturbing content, including Reels of people getting struck by road traffic, falling from heights to their death (with the last frame cut off so as not to see the impact), and people graphically breaking bones, the report says. In addition, Instagram also recommended a range of self-harm, self-injury, and body image content on teen accounts that the report says would be reasonably likely to result in adverse impacts for young people, including teenagers experiencing poor mental health, or self-harm and suicidal ideation and behaviors. The report also found that children under 13 and as young as six were not only on the platform but were incentivized by Instagrams algorithm to perform sexualized behavior such as suggestive dances. The authors made several recommendations for Meta to improve teen safety, including regular red-team testing of messaging and blocking controls, providing an easy, effective, and rewarding way for teens to report inappropriate conduct or contacts in direct messages and publishing data on teens’ experiences on the app. They also suggest that the recommendations made to a 13-year-old’s teen account should be reasonably PG-rated,” and Meta should ask kids about their experiences of sensitive content they have been recommended, ncluding frequency, intensity, and severity. Until we see meaningful action, Teen Accounts will remain yet another missed opportunity to protect children from harm, and Instagram will continue to be an unsafe experience for far too many of our teens, the report says. Barbara Ortutay, AP technology writer
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E-Commerce
As the dust settles on a botched logo redesign that turned it into a political and cultural flashpoint this summer, Cracker Barrel Old Country Store is no doubt looking to put 2025 behind it. In the meantime, the restaurant company has also trimmed its physical footprint as it looks to 2026. Reporting its fourth-quarter financial results earlier this month, Cracker Barrel revealed the planned closure of 14 Maple Street Biscuit Company locations. That amounts to roughly 21% of its company-owned stores for the fast-casual brand, which Cracker Barrel acquired in 2019 for $36 million. The company is projecting revenue for fiscal 2026 of $3.35 billion to $3.45 billion, and a comparable store traffic decline of 4% to 7%, in part due to the closures. Cracker Barrel also plans to open two new locations for its flagship Cracker Barrel brand during the period. Julie Masino, the restaurant chains CEO, addressed the logo controversy in an earnings call on September 17, saying it underscored deeply held feelings and a love for the brand among fans. The company reverted back to its old branding and halted a planned remodeling of some of its restaurants in the wake of intense backlash that followed the logo change. Maple Street Biscuit Company, founded in Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012, largely escaped getting swept up in the negative publicity. The brand has locations mostly centered around the Southeast, Midwest, and Texas. Which Maple Street locations are closing? Cracker Barrel did not provide a list of impacted locations. Although it disclosed the closures as part of its outlook for fiscal 2026, a spokesperson confirmed with Fast Company that the locations it cited have in fact already closed. Based on a Fast Company review of Maple Street’s store locator tool and review websites such as Yelp, the 14 recent store closures span six states, with the most located in Texas. The full list, which Cracker Barrel confirmed, appears below: Florida 2233 Gulf to Bay Blvd Clearwater, FL 33765 7756 113th St N Ste E Seminole, FL 33772 Kentucky 2270 Nicholasville Rd Ste 120 Lexington-Fayette, KY 40503 Ohio 9711 Sawmill Pkwy Ste A Powell, OH 43065 South Carolina 965 Wood Duck Dr Ste 108 Myrtle Beach, SC 29577 1739 Maybank Hwy Ste U Charleston, SC 29412 Tennessee 10837 Hardin Valley Rd Knoxville, TN 37932 Texas 967 Keller Pkwy Keller, TX 76248 4836 Waterview Town Center Dr Ste 300 Richmond, TX 77407 14999 Preston Rd Ste 226 Dallas, TX 75254 3288 Main St Ste 111 Frisco, TX 75034 3040 E FM 544 Ste 400 Wylie, TX 75098 8801 Eldorado Pkwy McKinney, TX 75070 4020 W University Dr, McKinney, TX 75071 A Cracker Barrel spokesperson pointed out that Maple Street Biscuit Company still has more than 50 locations. We appreciate the continued patronage of the many guests who have dined with Maple Street at these 14 locations over recent years and thank our team members for their passionate dedication to Maple Street and focus on delivering delivered fantastic guest experiences day in and day out,” the spokesperson said. “We hope our loyal guests will continue to dine with us at our many other Maple Street locations. Shares of Cracker Barrel (NASDAQ: CBRL) are down roughly 5% since its earnings report. The stock has fallen around 30% since late August.
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E-Commerce
Want to switch to Apple Music because you can’t find your favorite indie band on Spotify? Or maybe you’re on Amazon Music but saw a new subscriber offer on Tidal that’s too good to pass up. There are a variety of reasons to change music providers. But if you’re thinking about it, and you’re worried about losing your library of saved songs and personalized playlists, fear not: there are ways to bring all of it with you. Many music streaming services dont make it obvious often burying instructions deep in FAQs and making the process arduous but they do offer options to help migrate your collection. Apple made it easier last month when it quietly rolled out a new feature allowing users to import libraries from rival sites. Having Apple officially incorporate the feature might give reluctant users the confidence to move. Some pointers to help you along with your musical migration. Importing into Apple Music The iPhone maker recently published a help page to walk users through the process of importing libraries into Apple Music. The feature, buried in your settings, is provided by a third-party service called Songshift. It’s currently available to users in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. To use it, you’ll need an Apple Music account and the latest version of iOS or the Android Apple Music app. On iPhone, go to Settings, then Apps, then Music. Tap Transfer Music from Other Music Services to pop up a list of various streaming services. Android users can follow a similar process. Transfers can also be done through a web browser at music.apple.com. After choosing a service, another screen appears, prompting you to log into the target account. Now you get a menu with options to import All Songs and Albums” as well as All Playlists.” If you don’t want all your playlists, you can untick the ones you don’t want. However, you can’t pick individual songs and albums. Apple Music will then replicate your library based on your choices. Importing my Spotify library, with about 150 playlists, went fairly smoothly, although the process took about half an hour because the service also downloaded around 1,230 songs and albums to my iPhone. I had assumed that ticking All Songs and Albums meant that Apple Music would mirror the handful of music I had downloaded to my Spotify app, but it also downloaded all 63 albums in my Spotify library and the 440 songs on my Liked Songs list, which I normally listen to via streaming. If you dont want to download everything, unselect that option before you start. Also note that Apple says playlists “created by the music service can’t be transferred, so I couldn’t bring Spotify-curated lists like This is Taylor Swift or Alternative 80s with me. It also meant that my Liked Songs list, which Spotify generates for every user and a list I’ve been adding to over the years couldn’t be replicated. Any downloaded songs were just dumped into Apple Music’s library. After this story was first published, reader Linda Feaster wrote in with a workaround: create your own playlist and then add all the tracks from the Spotify playlist. It could be tedious if there are hundreds of songs but should do the trick. If you’re tempted to try out the tool, note that it probably won’t work the same way with every service. Apple warns that what can be transferred is up to the source platform. Playlists made by others, such as BBC Musics The Sounds of 1994, for example, did make it over. After the move is done, you’ll have 30 days to review songs that aren’t available or don’t have an exact match in Apple’s catalog, and choose from any alternate versions. Working with other music platforms Most of the other big music streaming platforms offer ways to transfer your library to their site. They mostly rely on standalone third-party services that have been around for a while, are free to use, and don’t need app integration to work. Tidal and Deezer both direct users on their websites to one such service, Tune My Music, which works with popular platforms like Spotify as well as a host of lesser known sites. Amazon Music’s webpage has dedicated buttons for Tune My Music and two similar services, Songshift and Soundiiz. Google also advises third-party services for YouTube Music users who want to import or export playlists, albums, artists and tracks. However, for Apple Music users who want to move to YouTube Music, the process is different. You’ll have to sign in to Apple Music and request a transfer a copy of your data, then export it directly to YouTube Music. The transfer process may take several hours if you have many playlists,” Google warns on its support page. Spotify says it’s currently testing a way for users to transfer their libraries and expects to provide more details soon. Using a third-party service to migrate between platforms It was super easy to move my Spotify library to Deezer using Tune My Music. I clicked a button on the Deezer website that got the process started by prompting me to log in to my Spotify account. Then a menu came up with pre-ticked options on what I could migrate: my entire library, favorite songs, favorite albums, favorite artists and any or all of my 150 playlists. I decided to move it all over, which amounted to more than 16,359 items. It took about five minutes. Unlike Apple Music, Deezer didn’t download any files, it just copied lists. A few dozen songs went missing, Tune My Music said. It usually happens because the song doesn’t exist on the new platform, or it’s named a bit differently and couldn’t be matched, it said, but added that I could download a list of missing tracks to look for them on the new platform. After you finish transferring your music library, don’t forget that it’s still on the original platform and hasn’t been deleted. Most third-party transfer services are free, but also offer premium levels with more features, such as instant syncing of libraries between multiple streaming sites. ____ Is there a tech topic that you think needs explaining? Write to us at onetechtip@ap.org with your suggestions for future editions of One Tech Tip. Kelvin Chan, AP business writer AP Business Writer James Pollard contributed to this report.
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