Meta has agreed to pay nearly EUR 15 billion and impose daily social media limits for children as part of a settlement with almost every US state, ending a trial in which the company said several states were seeking more than EUR 1 trillion. The agreement still requires court approval.
The case centered on claims that Meta designed its products to encourage compulsive use by children and failed to warn users about addiction and mental health risks. The company, which already relies on ID checks and face analysis to verify user ages, said it will apply a default two-hour daily time limit for people under 18 that teens can only disable with a parent’s permission. It also agreed to a default block between midnight and 6 am and a school mode that mutes notifications by default from 8 am to 3 pm.
According to Meta, the two-hour cap is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, with time on both apps counting toward the total, including cases where the company detects multiple accounts belonging to the same person. Teens will see prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time on either app, plus alerts when total daily use reaches 60 minutes and 90 minutes.
How the settlement money is split
The primary settlement provides up to EUR 14 billion for 47 states and the District of Columbia, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico. A clause would cut Meta’s payment by EUR 4 billion if other leading social media companies do not agree to similar terms. The states and Meta asked a judge to approve the 10-year deal in a filing in US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Texas, which was not part of the multi-state case, announced a separate EUR 1 billion settlement of its own lawsuit against Meta, brought by Attorney General Ken Paxton. That deal raises the potential total paid to states to nearly EUR 15 billion.
Praise and pushback from officials
California Attorney General Bonta said Meta agreed to make major changes within months, including time limits, halting notifications during school, an overnight app block during critical hours, and bans on plastic surgery filters. The Tech Oversight Project credited state attorneys general with forcing Meta into court and pushing it to protect young users.
Not everyone endorsed the outcome. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the multi-state settlement, writing on X that the payouts are “peanuts” compared with the harms Meta’s addictive features inflicted on children and “a slap on the wrist” for a trillion-dollar company. He said Florida will proceed to trial, adding that corporations “will never learn a lesson if they don’t incur real costs for breaking the law.”
Advocacy group Public Citizen also criticized the deal, saying billions of dollars sound enormous to ordinary Americans but, spread over a decade, amount to little for one of the world’s wealthiest tech companies. The multi-state settlement runs for 10 years and remains subject to court approval.
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Image: arstechnica.com
