Meta to pay 47 states up to $17.1B in landmark child safety settlement

Filed 5h ago · Via Stateline · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: The White House · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to 47 states, D.C., and several territories over claims it knowingly designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to children while publicly denying it. The deal follows a 2023 lawsuit and a trial that began last week in Oakland, and officials are calling it the biggest consumer-protection settlement since the 1990s tobacco deals.

Meta pledged changes including daily time limits, automatic pauses, midnight-to-6-a.m. blocks, and stronger anti-bullying protections, most required to last at least a decade. But the settlement conditions 30% of the payout, $5.3 billion, on TikTok and YouTube adopting comparable one-hour limits and paying similar amounts themselves.

Florida, New Mexico, and Texas opted out; New Mexico already won $375 million from Meta in its own suit, and Texas separately settled for $1 billion. Meta still faces thousands of ongoing individual and school-district lawsuits, including one from a South Carolina lawmaker whose son died after alleged sextortion on Instagram.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company agreeing to protect children only if its competitors agree to protect children first is not a safety commitment, it's a negotiating position with a press release attached. The states get a headline number and a decade-long to-do list; Meta gets to make its own reform contingent on rivals it doesn't control, which is a remarkably tidy way to keep most of the money.

Source: Read the original at Stateline → Scored: Super Circus · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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