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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Meta to impose daily limit on child social media use in deal with nearly every state:

Meta agreed to impose daily limits on children's social media use and pay nearly $18 billion in settlements with nearly every US state today, cutting short a trial in which Meta said several of the states were demanding over $1.4 trillion. The settlement requires court approval.

Meta is facing claims that it designed its products to foster compulsive use by children and failed to warn users of addiction and mental health risks. Meta, which already uses ID checks and face analysis to verify user ages, said it agreed to impose on people under 18 a "default two-hour daily time limit that teens can only turn off with a parent's permission," a default block between midnight and 6 am, and a school mode in which notifications are muted by default from 8 am to 3 pm.

The two-hour daily "limit is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, and time spent scrolling on both apps counts toward the total, including if we detect that someone has multiple accounts," Meta said. Teens will "receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on Facebook or Instagram," and "prompts when their total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes."

The primary settlement provides up to $16.7 billion for 47 states and the District of Columbia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. The settlement has a clause that would reduce Meta's payment by $5 billion if other top social media firms don't agree to similar terms.

The states and Meta urged a judge to approve the 10-year settlement in a filing today in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Texas said it struck a separate deal for $1 billion, raising the potential payments to states to nearly $18 billion.

California Attorney General Bonta said today that "Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms—and will do it within months. We are talking about time limits, stopping notifications during school, a block on the app during critical overnight hours, bans on plastic surgery filters, and so much more."

Texas was not part of the case, but Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Paxton simultaneously announced a $1 billion settlement of his own lawsuit against Meta. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the multi-state settlement, writing on X that "the payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta's profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids, and a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corp that'll pay more to lawyers than to the states. We'll see them at trial." Another post from Uthmeier said, "Trying to wipe out a decade of harm to the nation's youth with one month's cash flow is an insult. Corporations like Meta will never learn a lesson if they don't incur real costs for breaking the law."

The advocacy group Public Citizen also was not impressed, saying that "billions of dollars sounds enormous to ordinary Americans, but for Meta, spread over a decade, it is hardly the kind of penalty that will force one of the world's wealthiest Big Tech companies to rethink how it does business." The settlement got praise from The Tech Oversight Project, which said state attorneys general "dragged Meta into court and forced it to protect our kids," but added that Congress should pass a law to enforce protections on all platforms permanently.

[...] Meta's minimum payment to the states will be around $11.7 billion over 10 years. Meta agreed to pay another $5 billion ($16.7 billion overall) if TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat end up settling state claims on similar terms.

This effectively means that Meta will get a discount if its top rivals aren't forced to impose the same restrictions on kids' use. Meta, which still denies the states' allegations, reported revenue of $60.8 billion and net income of $15.8 billion in Q2 2026.

Although state AGs announced the settlement amount as $17.1 billion, that includes a $459 million deal from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport's office said that states today "also announced the resolution of claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties like Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the 2016 election."

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