Meta Will Pay $18 Billion and Add Major Teen Safety Rules to Facebook and Instagram
Meta has agreed to pay $18 billion to 29 U.S. states to settle claims over children's safety on Facebook and Instagram, accepting a package of product restrictions on minors that must remain in place for a decade TechCrunch.
The money will be distributed to the states over 10 years. But about $5.3 billion of the total is conditional: Meta will only pay that portion if YouTube and TikTok adopt similar teen-safety rules. Meta publicly released an open letter asking both companies to join it in implementing a daily time limit, nighttime access restrictions, school-hours notification suppression, and 15-minute usage prompts TechCrunch.
The product changes apply automatically to users under 18 in participating U.S. states and territories, pending approval by a judge.
Teenagers will get a daily two-hour time limit that adds up across Facebook and Instagram combined. Once they hit two hours, they are locked out of both platforms. The limit can only be turned off with parental permission. Meta will also detect users running multiple accounts to prevent them from getting around the cap.
A default "Night Mode" will block underage users from accessing, posting, or viewing anything on the platforms between midnight and 6 a.m. Notifications will be muted by default during school hours, defined as 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., with exceptions only for direct messages and alerts related to account security or safety.
Reminders will pop up every 15 minutes on either platform, on top of existing prompts that trigger when total daily usage reaches 60 minutes. Parents and guardians can set their teenage children's default feed to a non-personalized experience, meaning the posts shown are not selected by an algorithm trying to predict what will keep them engaged. Autoplay can be turned off, so a user has to deliberately tap or swipe to move to the next piece of content.
Like and reaction counts on posts will be hidden by default for underage users. Meta will block minors from using extreme makeup filters, building on existing restrictions that already prevent them from using cosmetic surgery filters.
Meta is also strengthening its age-estimation technology to identify users between 13 and 17 who register with an adult birth date, ensuring the protections apply regardless of stated age.
The settlement arrives after months of escalating legal exposure. On August 10, a U.S. appeals court ruled that Meta and other tech firms must face thousands of lawsuits, including one brought by 29 state attorneys general alleging the company illegally collected and used children's data Reuters. State attorneys general had been seeking civil penalties of up to $1.4 trillion, roughly equal to Meta's market value NPR. In March, a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent and liable in a landmark youth addiction case, ordering $6 million in damages PBS NewsHour. Separately, Texas secured a $1.4 billion settlement from Meta over biometric data capture in 2024 Texas AG.
The broader context here is about how these platforms are designed. For years, social media apps have been built to maximize engagement — keeping users scrolling, tapping, and coming back. This settlement forces Meta to change several of those defaults. Time limits across apps, non-algorithmic feed options, hidden like counts, and requiring users to deliberately choose the next video all push against the habits that keep people glued to their screens. The 10-year lock-in period means these are not temporary experiments that can be quietly reversed.
The conditional $5.3 billion is the most interesting part of the deal. Meta is effectively paying to shift the whole industry's norms. If YouTube and TikTok adopt the same rules, three of the biggest platforms teenagers use in the U.S. would all operate under the same safety constraints. If they do not, Meta pays less money but has to follow restrictions its competitors avoid, which could make its apps less sticky for teens.
One thing worth flagging is that the age-estimation requirement is genuinely hard. Figuring out whether someone is really 13 to 17 when they claim to be an adult has been a challenge for every age-restricted platform since they existed. Meta's agreement to strengthen this capability puts it on the hook for a problem that has no clean solution, and the settlement's enforcement provisions will determine whether "strengthening" becomes a concrete obligation rather than a promise.
The settlement, pending judicial approval, converts what was shaping up to be an existential legal threat into a costly but bounded outcome. Whether it also becomes an industry-wide standard now depends on two competitors Meta cannot force.
