Meta has agreed to pay a staggering $17 billion to settle a sweeping child safety case.
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta faced lawsuits from 47 states and U.S. territories over claims that it violated federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws.
The states accused Meta of deliberately designing its platforms “to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” while failing to adequately address the harm they caused to the “mental and physical wellbeing of America’s youth”.
Meta denies any wrongdoing, but on Wednesday it reached a settlement in the case, agreeing to pay $16.68 billion, cutting short a high-profile trial.
Under the settlement, Meta also agreed to stricter protections for young users, including firm daily time limits and mandatory breaks on Instagram and Facebook.
That means under-18s will now be restricted to 2 hours per day on Facebook and Instagram.
The company will also shut off push notifications during school hours and cut off access between midnight and 6 a.m., and strengthen age checks and put restrictions on material promoting eating disorders or self-harm.
Meanwhile, children will no longer be able to see likes and other engagement metrics on posts.
The deal marks the first time Meta has been required to fundamentally alter the way its platforms operate.
However, about $5 billion of the deal would take effect only if both YouTube and TikTok also agree to restrictions for young users, including one-hour daily limits, nighttime access curbs, and stronger age checks. Each would also have to pay roughly $5 billion to the states.
Meta has urged TikTok and YouTube to join the agreement in an open letter.
“We want to ensure teens benefit from this new industry standard, but we cannot do it alone. These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers—TikTok and YouTube—to put the same measures in place,” the letter, first reported by Axios, says.
“All platforms should empower parents and support teens in these ways because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another. For meaningful progress to happen, we urge our peers to join us.”
Still, the payout ranks among the largest settlements ever secured from a technology company by state authorities.
Even at $17 billion, however, the sum represents only a fraction of Meta’s financial firepower—roughly 8.5 percent of the company’s $201 billion in revenue last year.
It is also substantially smaller than the $200 billion California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey were initially seeking in damages.
The deal also settles privacy lawsuits tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Facebook users had their data harvested. California, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., will split $459.3 million under the agreement.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta celebrated the settlement.
“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 children and their families,” he said in a statement. “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms—and will do it within months.”
But the settlement does not end Meta’s legal troubles, with school districts and individual plaintiffs continuing to pursue separate cases, several of which are headed to trial in the months ahead.
It also follows two early courtroom defeats for the company in March.
In the first case, Meta was ordered to pay New Mexico nearly $1 billion over allegations that its platforms enabled child sexual exploitation.
In another landmark trial, a jury found Meta had intentionally designed its products to be addictive and awarded more than $4 million to a young woman who said she was harmed by that design.
It comes as other major tech companies, including Snap, YouTube and TikTok, face thousands of lawsuits alleging their platforms were deliberately designed to keep children and teens hooked, contributing to a broader youth mental health crisis.
