Meta agreed to pay up to $16.68 billion and impose strict limits on how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, settling a lawsuit brought by attorneys general across 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and additional U.S. territories2,5,6.
The case, first filed in 2023 by 29 state attorneys general, accused Meta of designing its platforms to addict children and misleading consumers3. Settlement discussions began during the trial's second week7, and the agreement was filed in the U.S. Northern District of California court in Oakland.
Under the deal, Meta will limit under-18 users to two hours per day across Facebook and Instagram, block access to most app features between midnight and 6 a.m., and mute push notifications from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on school days, with exceptions for direct messages and safety alerts. Take-a-break prompts will be enabled by default, triggering every 15 minutes. Like counts will be hidden for teens by default. Youth will also have the option of a chronological feed instead of an algorithmic one, and parents will be able to make that the default.
Meta expects to take a $10 billion charge in the current quarter for the settlement. About $5 billion of the total kicks in only if YouTube and TikTok also settle with states on matching conditions. Meta issued an open letter to TikTok and YouTube calling on them to join the pact. The two-hour daily time limit and midnight notification block will remain in place for five years, extending to 10 years if YouTube and TikTok adopt the same restrictions. Meta has indicated it could undo some safety features sooner if competitors do not follow suit.
Settlement funds are earmarked for public health purposes including crisis intervention services, after-school programs, outdoor activities, and youth mental health programming.
Internal evidence surfaced during the trial underscored the allegations. George Volichenko, a data scientist hired in 2022 to work on Instagram's "teen mental well-being team," testified that Meta made it difficult to ship features that meaningfully addressed the problem. He observed that just 0.165% of teens enabled an opt-in feature prompting a 10-minute break after extended scrolling. When he raised the low adoption figures with his manager, according to Bloomberg reporting cited by Platformer, "he was told that he shouldn't worry about the adoption figures being low for the tools 'because the team exists partially to protect the company against the upcoming lawsuits'".
Meta also ran an internal experiment known as Project Daisy in January 2020 after research suggested fewer likes were associated with worse mental health for some teen users, particularly girls. Meta estimated at the time that hiding like counts would reduce advertising revenue by 1%.
The lawsuit alleged Meta knew millions of Instagram users were under the age of 13, with internal records including charts showing Instagram's penetration into 11- and 12-year-old demographic cohorts and an internal report presented to Mark Zuckerberg regarding four million under-13 users. Meta's age-estimation algorithms confirmed that millions of accounts belonged to children under 13, according to the allegations.
Meta will also establish an independent social media research foundation and share consented user data with researchers. The company had curtailed internal research and data sharing following the Frances Haugen revelations in 2021.
C.J. Mahoney wrote in a blog post that Meta is proud of its historical work to protect children and of the new agreement.
ANALYSIS The conditional structure tying roughly $5 billion of the payout to competitor participation converts a single-company settlement into a mechanism for industry-wide product changes, giving state attorneys general leverage over platforms not party to the original case. Meta's willingness to accept a $10 billion current-quarter charge, combined with the algorithmic-feed opt-out and default-on break prompts, marks a concrete shift in how recommendation systems will operate for users under 18 on two of the largest social platforms.