Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
On August 26, 2026, a bipartisan coalition of 51 state attorneys general announced a settlement with Meta Platforms, Inc. resolving claims that Meta designed and deployed features on Instagram and Facebook that drive compulsive use by children and teenagers. The settlement was reached mid-trial, the trial having begun on August 18, 2026, in the multidistrict litigation pending before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The coalition was led by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky and New Jersey.
The states alleged that Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) by collecting personal data from users under the age of 13, and violated state consumer protection statutes — including California’s False Advertising Law and Unfair Competition Law — by making false statements about the safety of its platforms. Meta will pay the states up to $17 billion over ten years, structured as cost fund payments, guaranteed installment payments, and contingency installment payments that become due if and when competing platforms adopt substantively equivalent obligations. California’s share is expected to fall between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion, subject to court approval. The proposed settlement expressly states that it does not constitute an admission of liability, wrongdoing or violation, and creates no private right of action.
The injunctive relief is the more consequential part of the agreement, and it is unusually detailed. The obligations run for ten years from the effective date and operate in two phases. In Phase I, Meta must default teen users — defined as users with a predicted or stated age from 13 through 17 — into a Night Access Mode blocking access between midnight and 6 a.m., a cumulative daily limit of two hours across Meta’s social media platforms, and a School Mode disabling push notifications between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from August 15 through June 15. Push notifications are also disabled between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Only a parent may relax these defaults; a teen may make them stricter but not looser. Within four months Meta must implement “productive pauses” at 60 and 90 minutes of daily use, and must offer a reasonably accessible non-personalized (chronological) feed option, prompting teen users to switch to it every 90 days.
Meta must also hide like and reaction counts for teen users by default, disable cosmetic procedure filters for them, and default them into age-appropriate experience settings that limit exposure to age-inappropriate content and accounts. Within six months Meta must offer in-app reporting for illegal content, community standards violations, bullying, harassment, abuse, nudity and suicide or self-harm content, and must respond to potentially harmful reported content in English and Spanish within six hours in at least 90% of cases, with an appeal route where no violation is found.
On age assurance, Meta has one year from the effective date to implement third-party or proprietary age verification and to meet specified under-18 false positive rate thresholds — 10% for minors aged 16 to 17 and 3% for those aged 13 to 15 where commercially available methods are used, with somewhat looser first-year thresholds for proprietary methods that tighten in year two — verified by annual third-party testing and certification. Meta must also deploy detection models to identify and remove users under 13, on a staged timetable running into year three. An independent auditor is appointed for the full ten-year term, with access to documents and data and the power to test age assurance methods, audit under-13 enforcement volumes, and assess the time management and content safety features, although the auditor’s recommendations are non-binding.
Phase II is contingent: if Snap, TikTok and YouTube each adopt substantively equivalent obligations — by settlement, by legislation, or voluntarily with third-party audit verification — the defaults tighten to a 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. night block and a 60-minute per-platform, 120-minute cumulative daily limit. The release covers the states’ deceptive and unfair practice and COPPA claims but expressly preserves private party claims, including those in the parallel personal injury products liability litigation, and does not release future conduct.
Click here to read the California Attorney General’s announcement of the settlement.
Click here to read the fully executed settlement agreement.
