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Olivia Konar holds a banner with names of young people who advocates say died as a result of social media outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse on Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2026, in Oakland, Calif. Her sister Coco Konar died in 2022 when she was 17. Social media company Meta agreed to a nearly $17 billion settlement with a group of states over its child safety practices. Noah Berger/Associated Press hide caption
Meta has agreed to change the ways teens use its platforms and pay states up to $17.1 billion to settle claims its products are addictive and harmful to kids. It's the latest sign that long-running public frustration with tech companies is turning into concrete changes for the industry.
Business Meta, states agree to $17 billion settlement in child safety trial 2026 has already seen a wave of setbacks for social media giants. In the spring, Meta lost two high-profile court cases over claims its products, including Instagram, harmed young users . The company and rival platforms including Google's YouTube , TikTok and Snapchat all settled similar lawsuits , though thousands more are pending. This week, TikTok reached a separate $400 million settlement with the Justice Department over claims it illegally collected kids' data.
Technology Jury finds Meta and Google negligent in social media harms trial Pressure is also growing from regulators and lawmakers around the world. A slew of U.S. states have enacted restrictions on kids' social media use , while Australia last year became the first country to ban children under 16 from social media entirely, leading countries including Britain , Canada , Denmark , Indonesia and New Zealand to say they will follow suit. (In France, a law banning children under 15 from social media was blocked this month on constitutional grounds.)
"There's clearly an enormous momentum shift here in the United States and globally in the public's assessment of social media platforms and the broader tech industry," said Jim Steyer, CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization.
Meta's settlement is among the largest ever struck by a U.S. company. Critics are calling the recent run of legal defeats the tech industry's "Big Tobacco moment" — referring to the litigation campaign of the 1990s that forced tobacco companies to strike big settlements and changed how they marketed their products.
The settlement announced this week with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories aims to be about more than just Meta. It's structured as an attempt to set industry standards for how platforms treat young users. Meta agreed to pay out an initial $12 billion over 10 years. It will pay another $5 billion if YouTube, TikTok and Snap also reach settlements with the states, pay similar financial penalties and implement similar changes to their platforms, including stricter time limits, age checks, and blocks on nighttime use.
"This is an industry-wide problem. Meta is part of the industry, a major player in the industry, but there's a bigger ecosystem," California attorney general Rob Bonta said at a press conference on Wednesday. "We will not be satisfied until we address all of the problems in the entire industry."
Meta used its public statement about the settlement on Wednesday to call out its rivals.
"The framework we've negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms," Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement. "Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us. Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away."
YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat owner Snap didn't respond to requests for comment.
The settlement is an unusual approach to developing regulation, said Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for digital rights.
"Usually when we want an industry to obey a certain set of regulations, we have processes in place, whether that's passing laws in Congress or an agency exercising its regulatory power," he said. That involves safeguards including making sure laws or rules don't violate constitutional rights, he said.
Jain said that while "ensuring children are protected and have safe and private online experiences is important," he's concerned that the government not infringe on users' — including children's — rights to speech and access information online. He's also among privacy advocates who are skeptical about age verification requirements that could lead to tech companies collecting more data from their users.
Beyond the financial penalties and platform changes, Meta's settlement could have a "ripple effect" on other lawsuits, legislation and regulation, said Isabel Sunderland, policy lead for technology reform at Issue One, a bipartisan nonprofit that advocates for political reform.
She pointed to internal documents and communications among Meta employees and executives that have been made public during the federal trial in Oakland that ended in this week's settlement and in previous trials in California and New Mexico state courts this year.
"They're also opening up huge troves, thousands of documents of discovery that is hugely important for researchers, for lawmakers to be able to write better policy, for the public to understand what their relationship to technology looks like, and how technology companies are designing their products."
Business 'Profits won.' The child safety trial against Meta kicks off in federal court In the federal trial, former Meta engineer and whistleblower Arturo Béjar testified that he was involved in internal studies that surveyed how often users ...
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