OAKLAND, CA., 8/26/2026 — Meta Inc., parent company of the social media platforms Facebook and Instagram, agreed Wednesday to pay up to $17 billion to end a lawsuit accusing it of harming children and will implement a range of tools and practices designed to lessen the apps’ impact on their mental health.
Meta agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by a coalition of 29 states alleging the company knew about the harms Facebook and Instagram — which Meta acquired in 2012 — could cause and failed to meaningfully police children’s use of the apps while it illegally collected data on them.
The company was accused in the civil complaint of creating tools that were designed to maximize users’ time on the apps and collecting data on all its users without having meaningful age verification tools, which the attorneys general said was a violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, known as COPPA.
The settlement ends the suit, which was being heard in a jury trial in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland.
Meta was also accused of making misleading statements about its confidence in the safety of the social media platforms for younger users’ mental health. The suit contended the apps have had widespread negative impacts, such as body dysmorphia, eating disorders, depression, and unhealthy social comparisons.
“The data is clear. More time spent on social media tends to be correlated with depression, anxiety, body image issues, susceptibility to addiction, and interference with daily life, including learning.”
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
The company will pay the state of California between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion over 10 years. California Attorney General Rob Bonta said he was unsure how the Legislature would use the money but anticipated it would be spent on public health and related programs to mitigate the impact social media has had on young people’s health.
Bonta said the company had essentially agreed to implement all the fixes the coalition of states was seeking at trial, including trying harder to remove children under 13 years old from the platform, limiting tools that allegedly contributed to compulsive use, and, critically, agreeing to an independent auditor and to have the agreement enforced by the court.
“This is a major moment to clean up an industry that’s been hurting our kids,” Bonta said in a virtual news conference as the settlement was announced.
“From the beginning, this case has been about protecting our children — our future — online,” Bonta said. “The data is clear. More time spent on social media tends to be correlated with depression, anxiety, body image issues, susceptibility to addition, and interference with daily life, including learning.”
What will change for young users
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement that the company was glad to reach a resolution in the case.
The company agreed to implement several default settings for users under 18 years old and enhance efforts to detect users who might have used a false birthday to sign up and are underage. Some of those default settings include a daily limit of two hours, account restrictions from midnight to 6 a.m., and a pause on notifications during school hours.
“The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” Mahoney said.
But he said the changes would only be meaningful if other social media apps and companies implemented the same tools and practices.
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away,” Mahoney said.
Meta also agreed to block “likes” and other reactions to underage users’ accounts as a default setting, ban cosmetic or plastic surgery filters that change a user’s appearance in certain ways, and include an option to have an account feed that is not influenced by an algorithm trained on the user’s data to deliver personalized content.
The agreement includes a more robust effort to stop users from signing up who are under 13 without a parent’s permission. That would include some form of linking an account to a parent or guardian through another verification system, such as a phone that is linked to a verified account, according to Bonta.
The company says on its website it uses artificial intelligence as a “cornerstone” to its effort to detect underage users’ true age and will remove users suspected to be under 13 years old. Under the agreement, the company agreed to further develop and deploy tools to do so.
Young users will also have a new way to report abuse or harm, and the company agreed to act on most of those complaints within six hours.
Zuckerberg avoids taking the stand
The settlement halted what would have been day two of head of Instagram Adam Mosseri’s testimony in the case, something Bonta said was “telling,” as Bonta said the company’s court case had not gone well.
Meta lost a similar civil case in New Mexico that was decided by a jury earlier this year that concluded the company had internal communications that indicated it wanted to maximize young users time on the apps and had indications of the health impacts on users’ health, but that its executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, had made public claims that were the opposite.
While Zuckerberg and others publicly said they were prioritizing safety, a former employee who testified at the trial in Oakland, Arturo Bejar, said the safety team he worked for was sidelined, minimized, and that the company sought to stop learning information when it was not good for its bottom line.
Zuckerberg had been scheduled to testify at some point in the trial before the settlement was reached.
The Tech Oversight Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates for more regulation of social media, lamented that fact, as the group looked for what it said was accountability from a company whose products had cost some young people their lives and others their wellbeing.
The organization also called on lawmakers to codify the practices so they are an industry standard.
“This is a historic settlement that will have a lasting impact, but we cannot truly protect all children and teens until these protections are required on every platform and are permanent — that’s something only Congress can do,” the organization said in a statement.
The organization was part of a coalition of advocates who spent several days of the weeklong trial at the courthouse urging accountability for the company, which they said had hurt their loved ones.
“While Mark Zuckerberg failed to testify in this case, denying survivor parents an opportunity for justice and dodging questions about why the company designed its platforms to be addictive, Congress has the opportunity to get the answers that the American people deserve,” Tech Oversight Project’s statement said.
Could set new standard for social media industry
Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in court Wednesday that the issue of compliance remained “complicated,” including the development of the age verification system.
“There’s a lot of hard work ahead,” she told the parties in court.
The agreement is a “global resolution” that would end litigation involving the company and 51 parties in multiple states, including the coalition that brought the action in Oakland.
Bonta said he would seek to extend the regulations to other companies, and the state was involved in litigation against TikTok that could result in a similar agreement, although he would not go into specifics Wednesday about discussions with any other companies.
If other companies agree to implement the changes, Meta will pay the greater amount of the settlement range and will also further reduce the daily limit for underage users to one hour as a default setting.
SETTLED but not guilty…?????
They still have the data collection tools developed and can simply put a couple of filters on it.
Be careful out there 😉