Washington AG will not pursue youth online protection legislation in wake of Meta settlement

This story was originally published by the Washington State Standard.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown will not ask state lawmakers again to pass a sweeping bill to limit social media for youths, saying a recent court settlement with a social media giant is sufficient.

“The Meta settlement’s provisions go beyond the policies we were hoping to implement via legislation,” the Democrat’s office said in a statement to the Standard. “We have shown that a good path for us is through litigation and through investigation rather than trying to convince the Legislature.”

For two years in a row, a bill that aimed to rein in addictive social media feeds for under-18 users died in the state legislature because opponents said it infringed on free speech and data privacy. Last month, Brown, a Democrat in his first term, who had requested that state legislation, secured some of those provisions by going through the courts.

In the largest settlement with a major tech firm in history, Brown settled with Meta for $237 million as part of a $17.1 billion nationwide settlement. Brown’s office says it no longer plans to reintroduce the Protecting Children Online Act in light of the settlement.

Highlights of the agreement include a two-hour cap on minors’ daily use of Instagram and Facebook that will last for five years. That cap will lower to one hour per day and be extended to 10 years if other social media platforms also settle.

Push notifications will be paused during school hours and access to the app will be blocked altogether from midnight to 6 a.m. Instagram and Facebook will offer the option for minors to switch off their algorithmic feed in settings, and cosmetic filters and counts of likes will be removed.

All of these provisions hinge on age verification, which met with significant backlash in the state legislature because of concerns that it would infringe on the privacy of users. Those concerns were not resolved by the settlement.

Meta is required to adopt an age-assurance method by August 2027, and to remove under-13 users and implement the requisite design changes for under-18 users by the following year. Meta has two options: It can employ third-party age verification tools, or it can develop its own in-house age assurance method.

In the European Union, which recently adopted social media restrictions for minors, social media platforms will deploy facial-scanning technology to verify that users are over 13. Other possible methods include uploading government documents and inputting personally-identifiable information like addresses to be checked across existing databases.

“At this point in time, there’s not really a way to do age estimation or age verification without requiring some kind of data,” said Anni-Michele Jean-Pierre, the senior policy director at Children’s Alliance, a statewide advocacy group that worked closely with Brown’s office to push the Protecting Children Online Act.

Some advocates say Meta shouldn’t need to use third-party tools because they believe the company knows the ages of its users already, just based on their online behavior.

“This doesn’t mean that Meta is collecting any more data than they already have about people,” Jean-Pierre said. “What we’ve heard from folks in the industry is that they can already tell, with the existing technology that they have, how old someone is with a relative level of certainty within the first few minutes that they’re online based on their activity.”

The other sticking point for the Protecting Children Online Act was its possible unconstitutionality. The bill proposed to require social media platforms to default to a non-algorithmic feed for minors, so that users would not be fed content that they had not explicitly requested to see.

Tech industry groups testified that this violated free speech because the government was telling a corporation and its users what it could and could not say.

LGTBQ+ advocacy groups echoed this criticism late in the 2026 session, saying that a non-algorithmic feed would diminish the ability of LGBTQ+ youth to find affinity spaces online.

Under the settlement, Meta will offer users the option of switching their feeds from algorithmic to chronological, but the platforms will not default to a chronological feed as the bill had proposed.

That may assuage free speech concerns, but advocates of children’s online safety counter that kids won’t choose to turn off their algorithmic feed, which had been the crux of the bill.

“Making it an opt out rather than explicit consent, [Meta] knows the power of default,” said Danica Noble, current state house candidate and former Federal Trade Commission lawyer who worked on the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta. “This doesn’t fundamentally change the harmful product, it just gives some tools that I think are not necessarily going to be used to turn off that same potentially addictive product.”

By going through the courts rather than the legislature, Brown’s office has dodged questions of constitutionality. But that approach has left other questions unanswered that a bill may have put to rest: What happens in a decade, when the settlement’s requirements expire? Will other social media companies sign onto similar provisions? Who is the third party that will audit Meta’s compliance?

“I don’t think we should have a regime where we know you have a dangerous product and we’re just going to let you run with it, and if somebody ends up harmed, we’ll catch it on the back end,” Noble said. “I think that there are some pretty clear places that we do need legislation because right now, with the profit imperatives of corporations, their duty is to make money and value for the shareholders.”

Rep. Lisa Callan, D-Issaquah, sponsored the Protecting Children Online Act. She says she plans to pursue further legislation if other social media companies such as TikTok, SnapChat, and YouTube do not sign onto the settlement in the coming months.

“It’s excruciating to me that we couldn’t move it forward, but we have this great opportunity now with the settlement to understand the effectiveness,” Callan said. “If we can’t get it consistent across all the platforms, then we need to move forward with the legislation, some way, somehow.”

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