Meta to pay 47 states up to $17.1B in landmark child safety settlement

This article was originally published by Stateline.

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, on Wednesday agreed to pay 47 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of U.S. territories, up to $17.1 billion in penalties over claims that its social media platforms are addictive and a danger to children.

As part of the settlement, Meta also pledged to make changes to Instagram and Facebook that are designed to reduce young people’s use of the platforms.

“Meta intentionally exploited kids for profit and then lied about it, claiming its products were safe when its own internal research confirmed the platforms were addictive and harmful,” said Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, in a statement announcing the settlement.

“The physical, mental and emotional harms that intentionally addictive social media inflict on youth — and particularly teenage girls — are widespread across the tech industry, and this successful, coordinated multistage litigation has resulted in Meta being the first platform to come to the table and agree to such comprehensive reforms,” he said.

“It will not be the last.”

The settlement ended a high-stakes, landmark case, filed in 2023, in which states said Meta purposely designed its social media platforms with addictive features, that Meta knew it was exposing children to serious mental harms, and that it intentionally misled the public about the safety of those platforms.

Meta has not admitted wrongdoing.

The federal trial began last week in Oakland, California, led by a bipartisan group of attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.

State officials are calling the settlement the biggest consumer protection win since the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuit was “never just about the money.”

“Kids deserve a childhood that isn’t measured in likes and followers,” he said. “The online protections delivered by this settlement will bring a generational change that will make social media platforms safer for Kentucky families.”

In addition to the financial settlement, Meta agreed to make major changes to its Instagram and Facebook features for young users, including a daily time limit, automatic pauses, nighttime blocks that restrict access from midnight to 6 a.m., and stronger safeguards against bullying and harmful content. Most of the updates must be in place for at least a decade.

Meta is trying to drag its competitors along with it. The company agreed to further restrict daily time limits for teens only if TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt comparable measures.

Under the settlement terms, Meta will pay out just 70% (about $12.7 billion) to states unless TikTok and Alphabet-owned YouTube also agree to set one-hour daily time limits for young users, as well as night mode and age assurance measures.

Meta will pay the remaining 30% — $5.3 billion — if the other two companies agree to the new measures and each agrees to pay states about $5.3 billion.

C.J. Mahoney, chief legal officer at Meta, said in a statement that the changes needed to be made across the social media landscape to have an impact.

“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Mahoney said.

“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution.”

Settlement money will be paid out to the participating states and territories annually over a decade, based on their populations.

Just three states, Florida, New Mexico and Texas, aren’t part of the settlement. New Mexico won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, when a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for violating the state’s consumer protection laws. Texas negotiated its own settlement with Meta that includes a $1 billion payout and a promise of more safety features for children.

While state officials lauded the changes coming to Instagram and Facebook as wins for child safety, some free speech advocates expressed concern over broader implications of the new restrictions.

Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil rights organization said in a statement that safe and age-appropriate online experiences for children are critical.

“But we also see the potential for significant risks to everyone’s privacy and free expression rights online, especially in the ways this settlement will subject all users to invasive age assurance and limit all kids’ access to content and services regardless of their individual needs,” Ruane said.

Meta and other social media platforms still face thousands of ongoing lawsuits from individuals and school districts across the nation that accuse them of targeting young users with addictive algorithms and inadequate safety measures.

One of those is a lawsuit against Instagram filed by South Carolina state Rep. Brandon Guffey, whose 17-year-old son Gavin died by suicide in 2022. His family said they later learned he was a victim of sexual extortion after being targeted by a scammer on Instagram.

“Scammers put immense pressure and sometimes even a countdown on these teens,” Guffey said in an emailed statement after the settlement announcement. “Gavin didn’t deserve to have less than two hours before he took his life. He deserved to have a parent that was aware of this.”