Meta agrees up to $16.7bn teen safety settlement

Meta has agreed to pay US states as much as $16.7 billion and make major changes to teen use of Facebook and Instagram under a proposed federal court settlement filed on August 26.

The agreement would resolve claims by 29 states that Meta deliberately designed its platforms to hook young users, misled the public about risks and unlawfully collected data from children under 13. The filing says the agreement is not an admission of liability or wrongdoing by Meta, which has denied the allegations, and it requires court approval to take effect.

Meta would pay about $11.7 billion in 10 annual installments, with a further $5 billion payable only if rival platforms sign comparable agreements. That would bring the maximum to $16.7 billion. The company would separately pay $75 million toward the states' legal costs and $459 million to settle older claims tied to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.

California is due $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion over the decade, followed by New York with up to $1.13 billion.

The proposed safeguards would change how teenagers use Meta apps. Within six months, teen accounts would by default be locked out of Facebook and Instagram from midnight to 6:00 a.m. local time and would be capped at two hours of cumulative daily use across Meta apps. Messaging and long-form video would not count toward the total.

If competing platforms adopt equivalent commitments, the overnight block would widen to 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. and the daily allowance would fall to 60 minutes per app, capped at two hours in total. Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney called on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the framework “right away.”

Within four months, teenagers would be offered a feed that is not algorithmically personalised. Like counts would be hidden by default and cosmetic surgery filters would be barred. Meta would have one year to deploy an age assurance system. New accounts whose age remains unverified after 14 days would be treated as teen accounts.

Parents supervising a teen account would receive daily notifications of time spent, prompts to review settings and the power to adjust school hours. Meta would have to respond within six hours to at least 90% of teen reports of illegal or offensive content filed in English or Spanish.

An independent auditor, chosen jointly by Meta and a committee of states and paid for by the company, would monitor compliance for 10 years.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Meta had agreed to make changes that would reduce the risk of harm from its platforms within months. Meta still faces thousands of personal injury claims and litigation from school districts in the United States, which the proposed settlement does not cover.

The settlement would end the California trial in its second week if approved. Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified Tuesday that he promoted newly launched teen safety tools without disclosing low adoption rates from early testing several years ago. Other witnesses testified that Meta knew some tools were ineffective and that they were “designed to fail.”