Meta Platforms will pay up to $18 billion after US states accused it of designing Facebook and Instagram to hook children.
According to Reuters, the settlements, announced on Wednesday, end a federal trial which had become one of the biggest tests of claims that social media harms children. Meta will not get a complete rebuild, because Silicon Valley accountability tends to arrive with cushions fitted.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said in a statement. “The focus of this case was to protect our kids. The relief we are getting in this settlement is very meaningful and well beyond what any court has ordered or is likely to order.”
Meta agreed to restrict teenagers’ use of Facebook and Instagram to two hours a day for the next decade. It will block use from midnight to 6 am unless parents consent, introducing Silicon Valley to the radical idea of bedtime. The settlement does not force Meta to abandon personalised recommendations or targeted advertising. That means the attention machine survives, only with more warning stickers and parental permission slips attached.
Writing in its bog, the outfit said: “Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta. We want to get this right for parents and teens.”
The settlements include more than $17.6 billion in payments to 48 US states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Meta will pay another $459 million to resolve state privacy claims linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Some of the payout depends on whether Alphabet’s YouTube and ByteDance’s TikTok impose similar protections for children. Neither outfit was immediately available for comment.
Northwestern University law professor James Speta said the restrictions would change the experience on Instagram and Facebook and were designed to reduce engagement. Meta shares still rose 1.4 per cent in morning trading, because apparently paying up to $18 billion can look bullish if it avoids worse.
Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap’s Snapchat still face thousands of lawsuits claiming they knowingly tried to addict children to their platforms. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier was not impressed, saying: “The payouts to the states are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features have inflicted on our children,” and “We’ll see them at trial.”
