OAKLAND, Calif. – Meta Platforms agreed Wednesday to pay up to $16.68 billion and rebuild how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, ending a landmark federal trial in which a coalition of state attorneys general accused the company of engineering its apps to addict children.
The deal was disclosed in a court filing released Wednesday morning, in the second week of testimony before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California. Reuters reported that the agreement resolves claims brought by 29 states alleging Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook children, misled consumers about how safe the platforms were, and improperly collected the personal data of children who used them.
Meta denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement.
What Meta has to change
The money is only half of it. The proposed consent judgment requires nationwide changes to how teen accounts function. According to the court filing reviewed by NBC News, Meta committed to “daily limits and blocks on nighttime use for teenage users,” along with stronger age assurance measures meant to keep younger children off the platforms entirely.
Bloomberg reported the agreement also bars teens from switching off certain safety settings without a parent’s consent, and CNBC reported that Meta must build additional tools for parents and guardians.
Those are the exact features Florida parents have been asking for since long before Tallahassee wrote them into state law.
How the case got here
The trial covered consumer protection claims from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, plus claims from all 29 states that Meta violated the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from users it knew were children, without telling parents or getting their consent, and then using that data to train machine learning and generative AI models.
Legal scholars had compared the case to the tobacco and opioid litigation of the 1990s and 2000s, both in scale and in what it might force a company to change. Before the settlement, the states had signaled penalties that could reach roughly $200 billion, and Meta itself argued in pretrial filings that the plaintiffs’ calculations exposed it to as much as $1.4 trillion.
The pressure had been building. NPR reported that in a June pretrial ruling, the judge pointed to Meta’s own internal documents as supporting the states’ theory that the company’s time-restriction tools amounted to a public relations exercise. Then, one day before the settlement, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri took the stand and acknowledged that few teenagers had used a key usage-limiting feature until Meta switched it on by default.
Mark Zuckerberg had been expected to testify. He will not now have to.
The Florida question
Florida is not among the four states that co-led the trial, and it did not join the original multistate complaint filed in California. Then-Attorney General Ashley Moody instead filed
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