Meta agrees to pay $16.7b, introduce usage limits to settle US states' teen addiction lawsuits

Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, has agreed to pay approximately $16.7 billion and strengthen protections for minors to settle lawsuits filed by US state governments accusing it of deliberately hooking teenagers on its social media platforms.

According to settlement documents filed Wednesday (local time) in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Meta reached the agreement with 47 states and other parties. The settlement must receive court approval before taking effect. Under its structure, Meta will initially pay about $11.7 billion, with the total rising to roughly $16.7 billion if TikTok, YouTube, Snap and other major social media companies reach similar agreements with state governments.

California, which led the litigation, stands to receive the largest state-level payout at between $1.5 billion and $2.2 billion, followed by New York at between $800 million and $1.1 billion. New Mexico and other states that had already secured separate penalty rulings against Meta through their own litigation were excluded from this settlement.

As part of the deal, Meta agreed to limit the time users under 18 can spend on its platforms and to modify its algorithms to reduce addictive features. Minors will be capped at a combined two hours per day across Facebook and Instagram, and access will be blocked from midnight to 6 a.m. These restrictions can only be lifted with parental approval.

If competitors also adopt daily time limits for teen users, the cap will tighten to one hour per day, and the overnight access block will expand to cover 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. During the school year, a "school mode" will activate on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., disabling all notifications except direct messages.

Teen accounts will also have the option to switch to a non-personalized feed — one that shows posts in chronological order only from accounts they follow, bypassing the AI-driven recommendation algorithm that continuously surfaces new content.

Meta will be required to inform teen users at sign-up and every 90 days thereafter that this option is available, and parents will be able to apply the setting to their children's accounts directly. Teen users will not be able to see like counts or other reaction tallies on their own posts or those of others, and filters that simulate the appearance of cosmetic surgery or heavy makeup will be blocked.

Teen accounts will be set to private by default, and measures will be put in place to prevent unknown adults from searching for or contacting minors. Meta committed to building age-verification technology to stop 13-to-17-year-olds from registering as adults by entering false birth dates, and to developing an AI model to detect and remove accounts belonging to children under 13 — the minimum age for registration — with annual reporting on the results.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who led the states' case against Meta, said the settlement "will make social media a less dangerous place for our kids and bring meaningful change to the lives of children and their families."

Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the measures required under the agreement "point the entire industry in the right direction" and called on "industry peers TikTok and YouTube to immediately implement this new framework."

The state governments had filed the lawsuits alleging that Meta deliberately designed addictive features to keep children and teenagers on its platforms for as long as possible while failing to adequately disclose the associated risks.