Meta settles states' child-safety claims for $18B; Florida rejects deal as "peanuts"

California Attorney General Bonta said today that “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms—and will do it within months. We are talking about time limits, stopping notifications during school, a block on the app during critical overnight hours, bans on plastic surgery filters, and so much more.” Texas was not part of the case, but Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Paxton simultaneously announced a $1 billion settlement of his own lawsuit against Meta. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the multi-state settlement, writing on X that “the payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids, and a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corp that’ll pay more to lawyers than to the states. We’ll see them at trial.” Another post from Uthmeier said, “Trying to wipe out a decade of harm to the nation’s youth with one month’s cash flow is an insult. Corporations like Meta will never learn a lesson if they don’t incur real costs for breaking the law.” The advocacy group Public Citizen also was not impressed, saying that “billions of dollars sounds enormous to ordinary Americans, but for Meta, spread over a decade, it is hardly the kind of penalty that will force one of the world’s wealthiest Big Tech companies to rethink how it does business.” The settlement got praise from The Tech Oversight Project, which said state attorneys general “dragged Meta into court and forced it to protect our kids,” but added that Congress should pass a law to enforce protections on all platforms permanently. New Mexico, the other state that wasn’t part of today’s settlement, sued the company in a state court and recently won judgments requiring Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties and $567 million for a fund that would alleviate the “public nuisance” created by its social media services. Meta said it is appealing the ruling. The multi-state settlement says that states and territories can use the money for a variety of purposes, such as youth crisis services, after-school or summer programs, public health advertising, youth mental health programs, funding outdoor activities, training for medical providers on interactive media use and body dysmorphia, and grants to school districts and local governments. They can also use the money for “any similar remedial or restitutive purposes as those described” in the settlement and for “investigation, litigation, and related efforts to improve teen safety on social media.” Meta’s minimum payment to the states will be around $11.7 billion over 10 years. Meta agreed to pay another $5 billion ($16.7 billion overall) if TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat end up settling state claims on similar terms. This effectively means that Meta will get a discount if its top rivals aren’t forced to impose the same restrictions on kids’ use. Meta, which still denies the states’ allegations, reported revenue of $60.8 billion and net income of $15.8 billion in Q2 2026. Although state AGs announced the settlement amount as $17.1 billion, that includes a $459 million deal from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport’s office said that states today “also announced the resolution of claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties like Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the 2016 election.” California is slated to receive the largest payment, ranging from $1.5 billion to $2.2 billion. The state legislature and governor will have control over how much of it is spent, “but in the proposed settlement it is earmarked for purposes related to the prevention or remediation of mental health or other harms to young Californians associated with social media use,” Bonta’s office said. In addition to the requirements mentioned earlier in this article, the AG’s press release said that Meta agreed to “an enhanced mechanism for teens to report potentially harmful content and a requirement that Meta respond to 90 percent of those reports within six hours; a ban on displaying numbers of likes or reactions to users under 18; a ban on cosmetic procedure image filters for users under 18; [and] an option for users under 18 to have a non-personalized feed, meaning a feed that doesn’t use an algorithm to target them with content aimed to keep them endlessly scrolling.” Meta must use age-verification systems to detect users under 18 and remove kids under 13, will have to “bring on an independent auditor with expansive access to information and resources,” and “be subject to an injunction prohibiting it from making further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features,” Bonta’s office said.