ISABELLA CABRELLI RUSCONI––On August 26, 2026, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child safety measures to Facebook and Instagram, settling claims brought by a coalition of state attorneys general under state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The states argued that Meta intentionally designed Facebook and Instagram to keep young people compulsively engaged, knew about the risks that design created, misled the public about those risks, and collected data from children under the age of 13 without following federal requirements. The settlement, approved by a federal judge in Oakland, California, requires Meta to pay 48 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories, making it the company’s largest payment over child safety litigation to date.
Beyond the payment, the settlement also requires Meta to change how its apps work for teenagers, from how long they can scroll to how their account gets verified in the first place. Under the terms of the deal, Meta must limit teens to a combined two hours a day on Instagram and Facebook for the next five years, with mandatory pauses after 15, 60, and 90 minutes of continuous use. “Nighttime blocks” will also restrict young users’ access to the platforms from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., and notifications will be muted during school hours. Limits must also be implemented on social comparison features for young users, including beauty filters and visible “like counts,” especially because these features have been linked to poor mental health consequences in kids and teens. Additionally, within one year, Meta must implement an age-verification system that can be independently checked each year for accuracy, along with a separate system to catch users under 13 years old. Despite agreeing to all of this, Meta has denied any wrongdoing throughout the settlement. Still, according to Jayne Conroy, an attorney who has argued against social media companies in related trials, Meta is “changing their practices at enormous expense to them.” Even without admitting any wrongdoing, agreeing to redesign its own products suggests Meta is taking the states’ concerns seriously.
Importantly, the entire $18 billion payment is not guaranteed. Meta says 30 percent of it, about $5.3 billion, will only be paid to the states if YouTube and TikTok also reach settlements with them, pay similar financial penalties, and implement similar changes to their platforms, including stricter time limits, age checks, and nighttime blocks. This raises the big question of whether competitors will actually abide by these changes because, according to Munmun De Choudhury, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, research shows that when one platform becomes more restrictive, users will simply migrate to another. Professor De Choudhury highlights, “The kids who want to access social media between midnight and 6 a.m., when these platforms won’t be available, will go to TikTok and they’ll go somewhere else.” In her view, restricting only one company alone does not actually reduce the harm, but instead shifts it to a different platform, making the settlement only meaningful if its scope reaches the rest of the industry.
Another important aspect of the settlement is the shift in legal strategy by the states that made the deal possible in the first place. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act normally protects platforms, including social media companies, from lawsuits over what their users post. In other words, states could not have won a case that simply argued Instagram showed teenagers harmful content because that claim runs straight into Section 230. With this in mind, the states’ strategy was to argue that Meta itself knew its platforms were designed for users to develop social media addiction, hid this fact from the public, and kept those features in place anyway even with the knowledge of how harmful they were. By making an argument that emphasized what Meta knew and said, rather than the content on Instagram and Facebook itself, the states were able to avoid the wall that has protected platforms for decades.
This case is reminiscent of Big Tobacco’s settlement regarding addiction. In 1998, the attorneys general from 52 states and territories signed the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) with the four largest tobacco companies in the U.S., with eventually more than 45 tobacco companies settling under the MSA. The main argument by the plaintiffs was that these manufacturers knew cigarettes were addictive, manipulated nicotine levels, and hid what they knew. Experts have described the parallel between Meta and Big Tobacco as “obvious“, considering both cases involve government plaintiffs, incriminating internal company documents, and allegations that a company made billions off an addictive product that caused widespread harm. Jerry Liu, who teaches legal and ethical issues in business at Georgia Tech, asks the same question raised in the Big Tobacco settlement to social media platforms: “The question is whether the social media companies know that particular design features or algorithmic tools can create unhealthy or compulsive behavior, particularly in children, and whether they have an ethical obligation to disclose that knowledge and redesign the product accordingly.” More importantly, just as the 1998 deal eventually pushed the rest of the tobacco industry to sign on, Meta’s payout follows a similar strategy, designed to pressure YouTube and TikTok into adopting Meta’s changes while using money as the incentive.
Regardless of how other social media platforms respond, this settlement already marks a big shift. States found a way to hold Meta responsible for how it built its apps–not just for what users posted–without running into the law that has protected platforms for decades. Still, the key is not the $18 billion payment, but whether YouTube and TikTok will eventually agree to the same changes. If they do, this could change how Big Tech treats young users. If they do not, the settlement might just end up being an expensive lesson for Meta alone.
