August 26, 2026, 16:11 GMT | Insight
Meta Platforms agreed on Wednesday to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and implement design changes to
Instagram and Facebook as part of a watershed settlement with 52 US attorneys general over claims that the tech giant’s addictive social media platforms harmed children.
Meta Platforms agreed on Wednesday to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and implement design changes to Instagram and Facebook as part of a watershed settlement with more than 50 US attorneys general over claims that the tech giant’s addictive social media platforms harmed children.
“This is a major breakthrough, a milestone moment, a watershed moment, because when it comes to protecting our children's mental health, there is no time to lose,”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta said during a Wednesday press conference.
Bonta said the settlement carries the heaviest financial penalty ever assessed on tech companies. It far eclipses the $5 billion settlement Meta — then called Facebook — agreed to in 2019 following the Cambridge Analytica privacy leak.
Meta will pay at least $12.1 billion over a ten-year period to resolve the states’ lawsuits, with an additional $5 billion payment possible if other major social media companies also agree to adopt the safety feature changes included in the settlement.
Those changes include hard caps on daily time limits for children, “productive pauses,” improved parental controls, age assurance measures, restrictions on nighttime and school hour access, and independent auditing. Meta also agreed to block teens from using “extreme makeup filters.”
Meta has been defending itself against claims in state and federal courts that it intentionally designed Instagram to be deceptively addictive for young people and violated consumer protection laws.
“They know it’s going poorly,”
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said during a separate press conference in which he told reporters that “Meta has essentially surrendered at trial.”
“They know we have them dead to rights, and that's why Meta is going to pay the states, 51 of us, states, territories, and the District, $17.1 billion over 10 years," Tong said.
C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, called on
TikTok and
YouTube to “implement this new framework, right away.”
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said in a statement.
According to Tong, the total settlement amount also includes a payment for Meta’s conduct in the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, which erupted in 2018 following the improper sharing of millions of Facebook users’ data.
“That was about 600 million of this total 17.1 billion," Tong said.
—With additional reporting from Madeline Hughes in Washington, DC. and Mike Swift and Maria Dinzeo in San Francisco.
Please e-mail editors@mlex.com to contact the editorial staff regarding this story, or to submit the names of lawyers and advisers.
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