Meta Platforms has agreed to pay roughly $17 billion to settle claims that it deliberately engineered Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children.
The deal was announced Wednesday, Aug. 26, barely a week into a landmark federal trial in Oakland, California.
“Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for families,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose office helped lead the coalition of states that sued the company.
The settlement resolves 51 consolidated lawsuits brought by 52 attorneys general representing 47 states, territories and the District of Columbia, stemming from a case originally filed in 2023 by 29 states. Movieguide® reported when the trial opened last week that plaintiffs’ attorneys pointed to internal Meta research — “31 studies,” by their count — in which the company’s own staff used the word “addiction” to describe what Facebook and Instagram were doing to young users.
Plaintiffs alleged Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from users under 13 despite its own rules against it, and that the company used Facebook and Instagram to “entice, engage and ultimately ensnare” young users while publicly downplaying the risks it privately understood.
Related: Meta Heads to Trial Over Claims It Deliberately Hooked Kids
“We are taking a major step towards breaking the cycle of social media addiction,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James, whose office joined the coalition of plaintiffs.
Pending approval from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, Meta will pay out the settlement over the next 10 years and overhaul how its platforms treat minors. The changes include a default two-hour daily usage limit for teens, a midnight-to-6-a.m. block on minors’ feeds and notifications that requires a parent to override, the removal of “like” counts and cosmetic-surgery filters from young users’ accounts and a non-algorithmic feed option free of personalized targeting.
An independent auditor with direct lines to state attorneys general will monitor compliance, and Meta is barred from making false or misleading claims about its safety measures going forward.
A Meta spokesperson called the deal an important step but was quick to point fingers elsewhere, saying these protections “will only be truly effective if our peers — TikTok and YouTube — put the same measures in place.” It’s a fair point about the industry at large, but not one that erases what a jury was about to hear about Meta’s own design choices.
This is far from Meta’s only reckoning this year. Movieguide® reported earlier this month that a New Mexico judge ordered the company to pay $567 million over child safety failures, in a ruling that compared Meta’s platforms to a factory and the psychological harm to children as pollution needing to be cleaned up. Combined with an earlier verdict, Meta’s total liability from child-safety litigation now stretches well past $1 billion — and that’s before this week’s settlement.
Seventeen billion dollars sounds enormous until you remember Meta pulled in over $200 billion in revenue last year. No dollar figure fixes a design problem on its own, and no app-store update replaces a parent who knows what their kid is actually doing at 11 p.m. This settlement gives families some real, enforceable guardrails. It doesn’t give anyone permission to stop paying attention.
Read Next: Meta Learns the Literal Cost of Its Child Safety Failures
Questions or comments? Please write to us here.
