RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion over the next decade to settle a landmark child-safety lawsuit brought about by 29 state Attorneys General, co-led by California’s Rob Bonta. The suit alleged Meta designed Instagram with intentionally addictive features and exposed younger users to serious mental harms while misleading the public about the platform’s safety. In addition to the payout, the social media company will make sweeping changes to its platform, including a default two-hour daily time limit on Facebook and Instagram for under-18 users, and will bring on an independent auditor.
Meta’s settlement comes in as one of the largest of its kind. The agreement puts the social media giant’s payment at over 12-times higher than the previous highest settlement in the past four years—a mark Meta itself kept up to that point with its $1.4 billion settlement in 2024. At up-to $17.1 billion, state attorneys general describe it as the largest state consumer-protection settlement outside of the tobacco settlements of the 1990s—and it is the largest settlement ever reached with a single company in the New York attorney general’s office (the previous being in 2022 with the state’s $7.4 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family over the opioid crisis).
Previous settlements surrounding children and teen safety include TikTok’s $400 million children’s privacy COPPA settlement in 2026, Meta’s $1.4 billion Texas biometric data privacy settlement in 2024, Google’s $1.375 billion Texas data-privacy settlement in 2025, Meta’s $725 million Facebook user privacy in 2023 and Google’s $391.5 million location-tracking privacy settlement in 2022.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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