Tech and AI
A settlement of up to 17 billion dollars turns teenage screen time into a term a court can enforce
By Staff Writer | 27 August 2026
California's Attorney General and a bipartisan group of 51 attorneys general announced a proposed consent judgment on 25 August, eight days into trial. Meta would pay up to 17 billion dollars to the states over ten years and rebuild the defaults on Facebook and Instagram, subject to court approval.
The states sued in 2023. They alleged that the company had designed and deployed features on Instagram and Facebook that drive compulsive use by children and teenagers, and that it had misled users, families and the public about whether those risks existed and how serious they were. Trial opened on 18 August in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. It stopped a week later, with a proposed settlement that still needs the court's approval before it becomes a consent judgment.
Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families.
Rob Bonta, Attorney General of California
The money is the headline and the injunction is the deal
The payment is up to 17 billion dollars to the states across ten years, with California alone stated at between 1.5 and 2.1 billion dollars if the court approves. How California spends most of its share is left to its legislature and governor, though the settlement earmarks it for preventing or remedying harms to young people connected with social media use.
What the company has to build is set out in far more detail than the money is. Users under 18 get a default daily limit of two hours that only a parent can lift, and a default block on the app between midnight and 6am on the same terms. Notifications are blocked by default between 10pm and 7am, and during the school day from 8am to 3pm between 15 August and 15 June. Like and reaction counts may not be displayed to under 18s at all. Cosmetic procedure image filters are banned for them. They must be offered a feed that is not personalised. Teenagers get a stronger route for reporting harmful content, and the company must answer 90 per cent of those reports within six hours.
The ratchet, and the auditor
Two of the limits tighten automatically if rivals agree to match them. If other platforms accept similar terms, the daily cap falls from two hours to one, and the overnight block widens from midnight to 6am out to 10pm to 7am.
That is an unusual piece of drafting. A defendant's obligations normally turn on its own conduct, not on what its competitors later agree with somebody else. Here the company has accepted a term whose severity is set by the behaviour of the rest of the market, which gives it a reason to argue publicly that everyone else should sign up to the same thing, and gives the states a lever they did not have to litigate for.
Enforcement is the other half. The company must put in place age assurance capable of detecting users under 18 and of finding and removing children under 13. It must appoint an independent auditor with wide access to information and resources, regular reporting duties, and the right to raise concerns directly with the attorneys general. And it is subject to an injunction against making further false, misleading or deceptive statements about its own safety features, which converts a marketing claim into a matter of contempt.
What has not been decided
Nothing here is a finding. The case settled before judgment, so no court has held that the design of either platform caused harm to anyone, and the company has not been found to have broken the federal children's privacy statute or the two California statutes the claim was pleaded under. The proposal is a bargain between parties, and until the judge enters it as a consent judgment there is no order at all.
The part worth watching is the compliance timetable rather than the cheque. Default settings, age checks and an auditor with reporting duties are the sort of obligations that get argued about for years after the announcement, and the first disputes will be about what counts as age assurance and what the auditor is entitled to see.