Eighteen billion dollars, spread out over ten years. This is the amount Meta is paying to settle the lawsuit filed by 48 U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, which accused the company of designing Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to minors and of collecting data from 13-year-olds without parental consent. Federal Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of Oakland approved the settlement, describing it as a way to “change behavior” as well as to provide compensation, according to the BBC.
To understand the significance of this figure, one must consider where things started: Meta had stated that the damages sought against it could reach as high as $1,400 billion, nearly the entire market value of its stock. Prosecutors later scaled back the claim, estimating damages of $200 billion—roughly equivalent to Meta’s revenue in 2025. The plea deal, reached after just five days of trial, is therefore an economic solution even before it is a legal one.
What Will Change for Teens
Under the agreement, Meta commits to introducing active limits by default: a total of two hours per day across Instagram and Facebook, which can only be disabled with a parent’s permission; a “night mode” that blocks notifications between midnight and 6 a.m.; and a “school mode” that suspends them from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Visible “likes” on teens’ profiles will disappear, reminders will appear after 15, 60, and 90 minutes of continuous use, and extreme makeup filters will be removed. If TikTok, Snap, and YouTube were to accept similar restrictions, the limit would drop to one hour per day.
These are the same features that, according to internal documents that came to light during the trial, Meta had already tested years ago and chosen not to roll out on a large scale. Former Meta researcher George Volichenko told the BBC that in 2022 his team was working on a feature to mute notifications at night, but that his manager told him not to worry about the low adoption rate, because the team existed “in part to protect the company from impending lawsuits.”
The Defense and the Cigarette Precedent
Meta denied any wrongdoing, arguing that there is no solid scientific evidence of social media addiction and citing the federal law that exempts it from liability for content posted by users. California Attorney General Rob Bonta responded in no uncertain terms: “The trial did not go well for Meta.”
The states’ attorneys have built their case on the same legal framework used in the 1990s against the tobacco industry: companies that were aware of the harm caused by their products yet continued to sell them, only to agree—after facing billion-dollar judgments—to change their business practices. The parallel is not merely rhetorical: an internal Instagram study, cited in the trial, described teenagers as conveying “a drug-addict’s narrative regarding drug use” in relation to their use of the platform.
An isolated case—but not the last
The agreement does not resolve Meta’s legal issues. New Mexico, which did not join the settlement, has already secured two separate judgments—$375 million in March and $567 million in August—for failing to adequately inform users about the risks associated with online predators and sexually explicit content. In March, a Los Angeles jury ordered Meta and Google to pay $6 million in damages to a woman who attributed her anxiety, depression, and body image issues to a social media addiction that began in childhood.
Bonta called on TikTok, Snap, and YouTube to follow the same model of restrictions; Meta, through its general counsel CJ Mahoney, also asked its competitors to comply. But as long as there are no binding rules applicable to the entire industry, every agreement remains a case in point: a price paid by a single company, not a general change to the rules of the game.
