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.
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