In this Law360 article, Kandi Parsons breaks down Meta’s record settlement with 52 state and territorial attorneys general, which resolved claims that the company knowingly hooked kids on Facebook and Instagram.
Kandi noted that the settlement’s youth safety requirements echo measures already found in the roughly half of U.S. states that have enacted child safety laws, presenting Meta’s agreement as evidence that state legislation served as “a starting place” for the injunctive relief secured in the deal.
“It seems like the state laws out there were really a starting place for some of the injunctive relief here,” she said.
Kandi added that the settlement’s influence will likely extend well beyond Meta, noting that a company of its size adopting these practices could push the industry toward a new baseline, and that even companies in states without formal safety mandates remain exposed to enforcement through existing unfair and deceptive practices laws.
“States are laying out a blueprint with this settlement for how online operators can reduce risk and what measures they can consider to try to stay off regulators’ radar.”
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Meta’s landmark $17.1 billion settlement of states’ claims that it purposefully addicted kids to social media mandates many of the safeguards increasingly being required by a growing patchwork of largely contested state child safety laws, boosting not only the profile of these measures but also the push for Congress to enact a more comprehensive fix.
Ahead of the fifth day of what was expected to be a six-week bellwether advisory jury trial, the dispute came to an abrupt end when Meta Platforms Inc. agreed Wednesday to settle claims from a 52 state and territortorial attorneys general that the company prioritized profits over child safety and hid the risks of social media use as part of a yearlong effort to hook kids on its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The deal immediately drew praise from consumer advocates and policymakers for not only its record monetary penalty but also its requirement for Meta to implement a host of youth safety features, including default daily usage limits, nighttime notification blocks, programmed interruptions to stop endless scrolling, age checks, and stronger parental controls.
Many of these provisions mirror the restrictions and mandates contained in the laws that roughly half of U.S. states have enacted to force online platforms and app stores to restrict minors’ access to harmful and addictive materials, as well as pending proposals in Congress to require tech companies to do more to protect their youngest users, noted Kandi Parsons, a shareholder at ZwillGen PLLC who specializes in children’s privacy issues.
“It seems like the state laws out there were really a starting place for some of the injunctive relief here,” she said.
The validity of many of these state laws remain uncertain, however, as tech industry groups – including NetChoice, which counts Meta and major online platform operators among its members – continue to press challenges seeing to strike down these measures on First Amendment grounds.
The challengers have argued that requiring online platforms to engage in practices such as age gating, disabling features such as infinite scrollling, and altering algorithms that fuel personalized feeds would unconstitutionally restrict kids’ ability to access and share lawful content and platforms’ rights to editorial discretion.
While trade groups will likely continue to aggressively press these arguments, which have been met with mixed reactions by courts across the country, Meta’s agreement to implement many of the same features being challenged as unlawful could help garner broader support for these reforms, experts say.
“Although the settlement only applies to one company, when there’s a company of Meta’s size and scale following a number of these provision, they have the potential to become somewhat of an industry standard for the types of practices that regulators believe are sufficient and expect are going to be in place,” Parsons said.
She added that even in states that have yet to enact such online safety mandates, attorneys general have other powers, including the ability to police unfair and deceptive practices, to go after companies that they believe aren’t meeting their expectations for providing a safe online experience for children.
“States are laying out a blueprint with this settlement for how online operators can reduce risk and what measures they can consider to try to stay off regulators’ radar,” Parsons noted.
Meta’s deal also notably contains a contingency provision that ties roughly $5 billion of the total proposed payout to whether several of its competitors implement similar child-safety measures, which could further contribute to the broader adoption of these standards.
Kathleen McGee, a Lowenstein Sandler LLP partner and former bureau chief of the New York attorney genera’s bureau of internet and technology, said that she views the prospective measures that the deal requires Meta to implement, along with the application of similar restrictions on other platforms through either separate settlements or emerging legislative efforts, as marking the “closing of the aperture for social media algorithm and content directed at teens.”
“We’re seeing a tightening from several different vantage points around how platforms that are directed to teenagers under 18 and what that might mean for companies and their growth and how they develop and market their materials,” McGee said. “The movement is underway, whether it’s through litigation or legislation, and it will be interesting to see what sticks once First Amendment and other challenges to some of the various aspects of legislation are done running their course.
Peter K. Jackson, a privacy attorney at Greenberg Glusker LLP, noted that during a separate case in California that resulted in a woman earlier this year securing $6 million in damages following a bellwether jury trial over allegations that Meta and Google hooked her to their platforms as a child, a state judge had determined that the companies were shielded by immunity under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act for claims arising specifically from their alleged failure to remove tallies of the “likes” that certain posts generate. However they couldn’t use the shield for allegations tied to other allegedly addictive design features.
However, in its latest settlement with the states, Meta agreed that it would disable, by default, teen users from seeing numbers of likes or reactions on posts.
“One of the things that’s interesting here is that they basically agreed to something that probably never could have been a remedy that would have been obtainable of this trial,” Jackson said.
While states have taken the lead in regulating these issues, Congress has also demonstrated consistent bipartisan support for expanding online privacy and safety protections for children and teens in recent years, and Meta’s multistate settlement could provide an additional boost.
“It does perhaps politically make it more expedient when everyone is already doing it anyway,” McGee said. “So if the federal government wants to pass a series of guidelines or rules and regulations impacting social media that social media has already agreed to, that seems like a win for everybody.”
Although several promising efforts to enact such legislation have fallen short over the past two years, momentum appears to again be building in the current legislative session.
The most notable development so far came in June, when the U.S. House of Representatives in a 267-117 vote passed a package of legislation to boost online data privacy and safety protections for children and teens, known as H.R. 7757, the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act.
The KIDS Act includes portions of 13 different legislative proposals aimed at protecting kids from a variety of online harms. These measures include the House’s version of the Kids Online Safety Act, which would require social media, gaming, messaging and other online platforms to default to their most protective settings for kids and give children and parents tools to manage account usage and exposure to harmful content.
However, the House’s effort has drawn backlash from senators on both sides of the aisle for its notable exclusion of a duty of care requirement contained in the U.S. Senate’s version of KOSA that would make companies legally obligated to prevent harm to children.
Members of the Senate Commerce Committee reiterated these criticisms earlier this month when it approved its own package of legislative proposals designed to shield children from online harms presented by addictive design features and artificial intelligence-powered chatbots. The full Senate is expected to take up these proposals, which includes its version of KOSA, when summer recess ends next month.
While finalizing such legislation at the federal level this year is likely to be an “uphill battle,” the widespread and bipartisan support for some of the safety measures required by the Meta settlement is at least likely to an incentive to supporters to “continue to push so that these requirements don’t just apply to one company,” Parsons said.
Additionally, “now that you’ve gotten at least one of the largest social media platforms and its entire lobbying arm kind of behind this, it makes it a lot easier to pass legislation that corresponds to what’s required by the settlement,” Jackson said.
In responding to Meta’s settlement with state regulators, several prominent consumer advocates and lawmakers used the opportunity to ramp up pressure on Congress to push these elusive reforms over the finish line.
“This settlement marks a significant step for the growing movement to keep children safe online,” Josh Golin, executive director of the child safety nonprofit Fairplay, said in a statement following the deal’s announcement.
While Fairplay said it was “gratifying” to see state attorneys general hold Meta accountable and secure “valuable changes” to the way the company designs it products to shield children from addictive and harmful features, Golin argued that the deal contained shortcomings that demonstrate “how much farther we have to go to truly protect our kids from Big Tech.”
For one, he argued it is missing key reforms that could be covered by federal legislation, such as requiring Meta to turn off by default recommendation algorithms that send kids “down dangerous rabbit holes” and address harms posed by their artificial intelligence-fueled chatbots.
“In general, the settlement is too focused on offering parents tools rather than restricting harmful features,” Golin said, adding that these shortcomings highlight the need for the federal government to “step in to force these companies to make their products safe for kids by design” and end data-driven marketing to children and teens.
Additionally, while the deal is structured to require Meta to pay $12.19 billion over the next decade and to only forfeit the remaining sum if fellow social media giants TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat agree to similar child safety reforms, there’s no guarantee that these other industry heavyweights, which are also facing state investigations and enforcement actions over these practices, will capitulate.
If only Meta moves forward with boosting online protections for minors, that would significantly limit the scope and ultimate effectiveness of the deal, Golin noted.
“As our friends at the Center for Digital Democracy persuasively argue [that] ‘protections won this way, one company and one feature at a time, cannot keep pace with what is being built,'” he said. “States and Congress have to reckon with the business model itself and the risks it generates.”
The deal’s disclosure also prompted several key senators, including the co-sponsors of the bipartisan KOSA proposal making its way through the Senate, to step up pressure on their colleagues to establish a robust child safety standard for all social media platforms to follow.
“This settlement proves what we’ve said for years,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican and KOSA co-sponsor, said in a post on X. “Big Tech prioritizes profit over our kids’ safety, and it’s time for Congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act to finally hold these companies accountable and protect the next generation.”
Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who spearheaded the landmark Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act as a member of the House in the late 1990s, echoed these sentiments in responding to the settlement of the attorneys general’s claims that Meta’s child safety failures violated not only state consumer protection laws but also the original COPPA, which regulates the collection and use of personal data from kids under 13.
Markey said that while he was “proud” that COPPA helped to hold Meta accountable, it was imperative for Congress to pass new legislation to address these harms, including the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy and Protection Act, a proposed update to COPPA that would expand safeguards for teenagers and ban targeted advertising to minors.
“In this emerging age of artificial intelligence, Big Tech is finding more ways to exploit our children’s data and manipulate their emotions for profit, making them and an entire generation sicker,” Markey said. “We cannot rely on courts alone to secure strong protections for our kids’ privacy and safety — Congress must act.”
The enactment of federal legislation related to these issues would also likely deliver clearer and more uniform standards that could benefit both consumers and online platforms, stakeholders noted.
Ash Johnson, senior policy manager at the tech think tank Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, said in a statement that Meta’s settlement, “amid an onslaught of lawsuits against social media platforms, highlights the consequences of leaving Congress’ job to courts, state lawmakers and technology companies.”
“This approach is a lose-lose-lose scenario: Companies face potentially massive litigation over standards that federal lawmakers have not established, courts face complex questions of public policy with scant legal precedent, and families face a confusing patchwork of rules that varies by state and platform,” she said in arguing that Congress’ establishment of a “clear national framework” targeting specific online harms to children would alleviate these issues.
Jackson noted that while KOSA would cover more than just social media platforms, some of the concepts contained in that proposal are “not all that different from what we’re seeing put into place here” and are likely to be more appealing to companies than the stringent bans being pressed in places like Australia and the European Union on children under 16 using social media.
“It seems, ideally, that people would like to see legislation [in the U.S.] on this that’s sort of nationwide and that sets some ground rules, and what’s emerged through this settlement is a kind of rubric for how we want this to look for at least social media platforms,” Jackson said, adding that this type regulatory framework is likely to be “preferable” for companies like Meta to “a world where the social view is that we shouldn’t have kids on these platforms at all.”
In the absence of nationwide legislation, federal regulators such as the Federal Trade Commission are also likely to continue to aggressively enforce these issues, attorneys say.
Notably, the Meta settlement comes on the heels of the U.S. Department of Justice announcing Aug. 21 that it had resolved claims, which it had brought in 2024 at the behest of the FTC, that TikTok had illegally collected personal information from kids under 13, in violation of COPPA.
The resolution requires TikTok to pay $300 million immediately and an additional $100 million upon entry of an order vacating the consent decree that the FTC entered against TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly, in 2019 to resolve similar children’s privacy allegations. In scrapping the prior deal, the DOJ acknowledged TikTok’s recent change in ownership to a new U.S.-based joint venture and how it had already implemented “extensive measures designed to strengthen safeguards for younger users, improve age-related controls, and enhance parental oversight.”
“The deal shows that when a company enters into a settlement with a regulator, that’s not necessarily the end of the story,” Parsons said. “There’s going to be continued review of compliance with that settlement, so companies need to be really thoughtful about what they agree to do, especially as regulators are clearly moving toward increased oversight of minors’ online safety.”
Brazil’s data protection agency also separately fined TikTok owner ByteDance 153.8 million reais ($29.81 million) on Aug. 25 for allegedly violating the country’s General Data Protection Law by mishandling the personal data of children and teens, marking the largest penalty and the first issued against a social media company since the agency was created in 2020.
Following these resolutions, attorneys expect to see no letdown from federal or state regulators on these issues anytime soon.
“It will be interesting to see what new matters the FTC and other regulators pursue in the coming year,” McGee said, “given some of the wind in the sails of regulators generally after the Meta settlement.”
The MDL is In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, case number 4:22-md-03047, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The instant case is People of the State of California et al. v. Meta Platforms Inc., case number 4:23-cv-05448, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
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