Meta reaches landmark $18 billion settlement with states in trial over teen social media addiction
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8:38 AM on Wednesday, August 26
By BARBARA ORTUTAY, KELVIN CHAN and KAITLYN HUAMANI
OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of a landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state.
The settlement resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to hook young people’s attention.
The agreement “institutes real change, real transparency, real protections for children and teens across the country,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.
If approved by the court, the deal will stop an avalanche of litigation by states against Meta, although the company still faces lawsuits from individuals and school districts throughout the U.S. For the states, the settlement delivers money for mental-health programs for kids, including after-school or summer activities and digital literacy counselors.
Advocates cheered the new protections, including default time limits and the disabling of features such as “like” counts.
But “we cannot truly protect all children and teens until these protections are required on every platform and are permanent — that’s something only Congress can do,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project.
The settlement will be paid out over 10 years. California will get the largest sum of at least $1.5 billion, but several other states will still collect hundreds of millions of dollars each over the decade.
The settlement “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm," Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said.
Meta said in a blog post that it was “building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.”
“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard."
The company urged competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar safety measures.
The $18 billion settlement is a fraction of Meta's 2025 revenue of $201 billion. Meta shares closed up about 1% Wednesday, although they rose as much as 4% during the day.
The agreement cuts short an ongoing court case involving California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which were among 29 states that sued Meta in 2023. The federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been among the witnesses expected to take the stand.
The lawsuit accused Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding them from the public. The case also argued that Meta violated federal laws by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent.
The cases in other states had been expected to go to trial later, but are now resolved. The settlement covers 48 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories. The only two states to be excluded are New Mexico, which went to trial in its case against Meta and won earlier this year, and Florida, where the attorney general said the settlement was not tough enough on Meta.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote on X that the “payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids.”
Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to adopt a series of safety features, including two-hour daily time limits that can only be disabled with a parent's permission and pauses for children using Instagram and Facebook.
The company will eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours and bring in “robust” age-assurance measures and “age-appropriate” content controls to prevent bullying and harmful material about eating disorders and self-harm.
There will be stronger and more user-friendly parental controls and limits on social comparison features such as “like” counts.
An independent auditor will assess how Meta is implementing the safety features and how effective they are.
The company said 30% of the settlement amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
Neither YouTube owner Google nor TikTok responded to requests for comments.
Meta officials declined to comment on whether they had conversations with their competitors about those conditions, but said they intentionally designed the agreement with the states to incentivize the rest of the industry to follow suit.
Some of the safety measures Meta will implement, like disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters, made sense regardless of whether competing platforms do the same, Meta said. Other features, like the overnight block, will function better if they are established across the board, the company said.
If industry peers sign on to the agreement, Meta will implement stronger defaults for teens’ daily time limit and the length of time for “night mode.”
The federal lawsuit was the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont. It followed newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in 2021, that found the company knew about the harm Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.
Meta has since added a host of safety features to Instagram, including separate accounts for teenagers with stronger protections around messaging and privacy, along with content restrictions.
But child-safety advocates and experts, along with some former Meta employees, have long contended that the features are little more than window dressing.
Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director who testified last week in the Oakland trial, called the settlement a “significant milestone” but warned that it should not be interpreted as an “all clear” sign that Instagram is now safe for children.
“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview. He urged the court to address that “because it’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”
Parents and advocates celebrated the settlement as a moment of accountability for Meta. Victoria Hinks, mother of Alexandra “Owl” Hinks, who died by suicide at age 16, said she was satisfied with the terms “as long as they enforce it properly.”
“It felt like today finally something was done,” she said outside the Oakland courthouse. “I feel like justice is possible.”
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Chan reported from London. Huamani reported from Los Angeles. Associated Press writers Sarah Rankin in Richmond, Virginia, and Wyatte Grantham-Philips in Chicago contributed to this report.
