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Meta on Wednesday agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make sweeping changes to its Facebook and Instagram platforms under a landmark settlement with 48 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories over allegations the company knowingly designed its platforms in ways that endangered children.
The agreement, which represents one of the largest settlements ever involving a technology company, could mark a major turning point in the growing legal and political fight over social media’s effects on children.
Meta initially will pay about $12 billion over 10 years. The company could pay another $5 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also agree to financial penalties and adopt comparable safeguards, according to the states.
The settlement requires Meta to impose new restrictions on how teenagers use Instagram and Facebook, including two-hour daily time limits, interruptions to endless scrolling, restrictions on nighttime use and stronger age-verification and parental-control measures.
The company also agreed to limit features, including beauty filters and public “like” counts, that critics and psychologists say can lead to harmful social comparison.
District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb said the agreement came after the company engaged in deceptive business practices.
“Meta intentionally exploited kids for profit and then lied about it, claiming its products were safe when its own internal research confirmed the platforms were addictive and harmful,” he said in a statement.
Schwalb added:
“The physical, mental, and emotional harms that intentionally addictive social media platforms inflict on youth — and particularly teenage girls — are widespread across the tech industry, and this successful, coordinated multistate litigation has resulted in Meta being the first platform to come to the table and agree to such comprehensive reforms. It will not be the last.”
The states’ agreement effectively ends a closely watched federal case in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland.
California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey had sought roughly $200 billion from Meta over allegations that the company harmed children.
Chief U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to review and approve the settlement.
Meta separately agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle similar allegations brought by Texas, bringing the company’s announced settlements with states to more than $18 billion.
The settlements come as Meta faces thousands of additional lawsuits filed by children, families and school districts alleging the company and other social media platforms deliberately used addictive design features to keep young users online.
The legal challenges have drawn comparisons to the litigation strategy used against tobacco companies in the 1990s, with plaintiffs arguing that technology companies knew or should have known that features such as infinite scrolling, autoplay, algorithmic recommendations and notifications could cause harm.
Despite news of the settlement, Meta Platforms shares rose 1% on Wednesday.
Meta calls for industrywide agreement
The agreement includes daily time limits that teens cannot disable, default nighttime blocks, muted notifications during school hours and new parental controls, Meta said.
C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said the measures are intended to give parents more control over their children’s social media use while establishing what the company called a broader industry standard.
“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours, set the right path forward for our whole industry,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney acknowledged that the measures will have limited impact if teens can simply move to other platforms. He called on TikTok, Snap and YouTube to adopt the same restrictions.
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said. “These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.”
Meta’s argument is substantial because teenagers increasingly move between multiple platforms. If one company imposes restrictions while competitors continue offering unlimited scrolling, algorithmic recommendations and other engagement features, the company could lose users without necessarily eliminating the underlying risks.
Snap, YouTube and TikTok did not respond to The Defender’s requests for comments.
‘Meta has suffered overwhelming defeats in courts’
Advocates for child safety and social media called the litigation a major victory.
Matthew P. Bergman, founding attorney of the Social Media Victims Law Center, referred to the agreement as a watershed moment that will hold “the tech giant accountable for designing products it knew were harming children and fueling a nationwide youth mental health crisis.”
“Over the past year, Meta has suffered overwhelming defeats in courts across the country as expert testimony and its own internal documents revealed that senior executives ignored repeated warnings that its products were addictive and harmful by design,” Bergman said.
Meta has disputed claims that it deliberately designed its products to harm children and has said it has invested heavily in safety measures for young users.
The company also maintains that it is protected in many cases by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which generally shields internet companies from liability for content posted by users.
The litigation, however, has already produced setbacks for Meta.
In March, a jury found Meta and Google/YouTube liable in a personal-injury case brought by a teenager identified as K.G.M. and awarded $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
Meta and Google sought to overturn the verdict and obtain a new trial, but a judge rejected those efforts in June, allowing the verdict to stand. TikTok and Snapchat settled before the trial.
The case was significant because the jury found that Instagram’s design features were a substantial factor in causing the plaintiff’s injuries and that Meta had failed to adequately warn about associated risks, according to attorneys involved in the litigation.
Settlement could reshape social media
News of the settlement arrives as governments around the world move toward stricter restrictions on children’s access to social media.
Australia last year became the first country to prohibit children under 16 from using social media. Other countries, including Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, India, Indonesia and Malaysia, have adopted or considered restrictions.
In the U.S., lawmakers have revived the Kids Online Safety Act, which would strengthen protections for minors and give young users greater control over certain algorithmic features.
Multiple states have also enacted laws addressing social media and children.
The Meta settlement could give those efforts additional momentum by establishing concrete restrictions on some of the design features that critics say encourage compulsive use.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said:
“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. Alongside a bipartisan coalition of my colleagues, I am proud to deliver this settlement that addresses the concerns at the core of our lawsuit and institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram — right now, no more waiting.”
Could changes shift decision-making from parents to governments?
While the settlement between Meta and state attorneys general is being promoted as a major child-safety measure, critics argue that it could expand government involvement in family decisions, digital surveillance and online speech.
Attorney Greg Glaser said implementing enhanced age assurance measures of this nature inherently requires “greater collection of biometric data, government IDs, and digital tracking.”
“To ‘protect’ children, tech monopolies will now demand more personal, sensitive data from families, laying the groundwork for a broader digital control grid,” he said. “And the government is allowing it.”
Glaser argued that state-mandated usage limits, age-verification requirements and digital curfews laid out in the settlement agreement could also shift decisions traditionally made by parents to government agencies.
“The government is effectively stepping in as the universal parent,” he said, enforcing what he characterized as bureaucratic control under the guise of child safety.
He argued that policymakers should focus instead on broader health concerns and individual rights, including what he described as the right to use traditional identification rather than digital ID.
“If state attorneys general were truly interested in protecting children,” Glaser said, “they would focus on real-world health and restoring fundamental rights” rather than pursuing settlements that, in his view, could expand government surveillance into the home.
What about the First Amendment?
Another provision in the agreement could have user rights implications. The settlement says Meta and the states waive the right to challenge the agreement on constitutional grounds, even though Meta retains the right to challenge other age-verification laws.
The arrangement therefore avoids the type of First Amendment court challenge that has blocked or limited similar state laws.
In a meeting held earlier this year by the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection on age-verification technology and its relationship to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, Chairman Andrew Ferguson addressed this constitutional issue.
He cited the pornography industry’s legal challenges to age-verification laws, referencing the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling on Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton.
In that 2025 case, the Supreme Court ruled that Texas can legally require adult websites to verify that their users are 18 or older to protect minors, even though it places some burden on adults trying to access that lawful content, prompting questions surrounding user rights.
“They did not dare to object to the principles that minor children should not have access to pornography,” said Ferguson. “Instead, they argued that online age verification requirements would prove too chilling for adult consumers of online pornography, infringing on the exercise of their putative First Amendment rights to access pornographic content.”
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Meta will continue fighting thousands of other related lawsuits
The settlement does not resolve the thousands of individual and school-district lawsuits still pending against Meta and other technology companies.
School districts have accused social media companies of creating a public nuisance by contributing to widespread student mental health problems and forcing schools to absorb the resulting costs.
Individual families have brought personal-injury claims alleging that social media platforms exposed children to harmful content and encouraged compulsive use.
Meta said it intends to continue fighting those cases and remains confident it can defeat additional personal-injury claims.
One of the individual cases involves London Izabella-Ryén Gadd, a 12-year-old Michigan girl whose mother, Charay Gadd, says suffered from years of addictive social media use before dying by suicide in July 2024.
Gadd said she tried to limit her daughter’s exposure to social media by taking it away at night, imposing time limits, and prohibiting phone use during meals and family vacations without luck.
“Parents cannot possibly compete with algorithms and design systems developed by multibillion-dollar corporations specifically to capture and hold attention,” she said.
For families such as the Gadds, litigation is about more than financial compensation.
“I want discovery. I want internal documents. I want executives under oath,” Gadd said.
She added:
“I want families to understand what these companies knew about children, what their internal research showed, when they knew it, and what decisions were made after they knew it … We cannot meaningfully reform children’s mental health while ignoring the digital environment in which they are growing up.”
Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., contributed to the reporting.
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