Meta Settles $18 Billion Over Children's Privacy and Social Media Addiction in High-Profi-
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Meta has agreed to settle a high-profile case over children's privacy and social media addiction. The company will pay up to $18 billion and make changes to its platforms to resolve claims from dozens of states that it designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to young users and collected children's personal data. A court still needs to sign off on the proposed settlement, in which Meta denied wrongdoing.
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CNETInstagram and Facebook parent company Meta has struck a deal with the 29 US states currently suing the tech giant for intentionally designing its social media platforms to be addictive and harmful to children and teens. Reuters first reported the settlement, saying the company could pay a maximum of $16.68 billion, which is less than 10% of the company’s 2025 annual revenue ($200.97 billion).
WiredWell, that was quick. Not even a quarter of the way into an expected 19-day federal trial over Meta’s alleged failure to protect young users, the social media giant agreed to settle the case. The company has agreed to pay up to $16.7 billion to 51 US states and territories, and make substantive product changes for how teens engage with its platforms.
The VergeUnder the terms of the settlement, Meta agreed to come up with an age assurance standard that is subject to independent testing, and must have a false positive rate no higher than 10 percent for users aged 16 to 17, and 3 percent for users aged 13 to 15. The company also agreed to give teens the option to turn off personalized feeds, meaning that they won’t be shown content based on Meta’s recommendation algorithm, and Meta will suspend push notifications for teens between 10 PM and 7 AM unless parents disable those restrictions, as well as limit teens to two hours of Meta app usage per day (with exceptions for messaging and “longform content”).
TechCrunchThe lawsuit alleged that the social media giant knowingly designed platforms like Instagram and Facebook to addict children, despite knowing about the harms the platforms could pose to young users. The states also claimed that Meta knowingly collected data from children without parental knowledge, which violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).
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This week, the attorneys general coalition zeroed on Instagram’s well-being team, which has been developing features to address some of the concerns about teen social media use since 2018. Testimony from an ex-data scientist, current product design director, and veteran executive Mosseri started to show how the states hoped to convince Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and the eight jurors advising her that Meta engaged in unfair and deceptive business.
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EngadgetInstagram boss Adam Mosseri took the stand in Meta's latest trial over social media addiction and children's privacy Tuesday. During his testimony, Mosseri said that it was "news to me" that Instagram employees were told by a company lawyer to "limit" certain types of data they presented to the executive as part of their work on teen safety.
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Fogu wasn't the first witness to testify about "take a break." The jury also heard from a former data scientist at Meta, George Volichenko, who said the feature had a "very low and disappointing" adoption rate among teens after it was introduced in 2022. Volichenko said that early findings showed only .165 percent of teens opted to take a 10-minute break from Instagram, though adoption later increased to .2 percent. He described the feature as "easy to dismiss."
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WiredOn Tuesday, the focus was largely on a feature called Take A Break, which reminds teen users to limit extended use of Instagram. According to testimony, less than 1 percent of Instagram’s weekly teen users had actually activated the feature months after its launch. Two years in, adoption still sat at only 1.8 percent. Uptake for another usage-limiting feature known as Quiet Mode was barely any better, documents shown during the trial on Tuesday showed.
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Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 Engadget The head of Instagram is the first high-profile exec to testify in the latest social media addiction trial.
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02 The Verge Meta settled its latest kids online safety trial with a group of 29 state attorneys general, sparing it from the remainder of a trial that could have cost it hundreds of billions of dollars.
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03 Wired The states began presenting their case by calling on current and former Meta employees to describe an alleged culture of maintaining or growing engagement above all else, to the detriment of young users. An academic psychologist testified that adolescents, and especially girls, who spent more hours on social media were more likely to be depressed or unhappy, which contributed to increases in teen loneliness and self-harm over the past 15 years.
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- verge
- cnet
- techcrunch
- wired
- engadget