AG Brown announces largest Big Tech settlement in history
Meta to pay up to $17 billion and implement sweeping child-safety reforms on Instagram and Facebook
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown announced today a landmark $17.1 billion multistate settlement with Meta Platforms, Inc., to end litigation alleging the company knowingly failed to protect children on Facebook and Instagram.
Subject to court approval, this is the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.
The agreement resolves claims by 46 other states and Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands that the company designed Facebook and Instagram with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, illegally collected preteen users’ data without parental permission, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, among other things. In addition to the payment, Meta must implement a sweeping set of safety features designed to protect children on Instagram and Facebook.
This settlement is a monumental victory for the protection of Washington children and is the first step in fundamentally transforming how the social media industry designs products for kids and teens. Under the settlement, Washington will receive $237 million guaranteed, and up to nearly $339 million over the next 10 years. The additional funding is contingent on the states working with other social media companies to come to similar agreements.
“Let me say to the young people of Washington state: This agreement shows that your health and safety is more important than Meta’s profits,” Brown said. “Ever since taking office, I’ve been fighting to protect Washington children online. Now, through the hard work of state attorneys general across the country, including our own consumer protection team, we’ve delivered a transformative settlement that will help break compulsive screen use and allow kids across our state to live healthier lives, with more time for sleep, learning, and building social skills.”
For two years, Brown pushed for a state law to prohibit addictive social media feeds for kids. It didn’t pass. Today’s settlement secures changes that are similar, and in some ways stronger, to the ones Brown has pushed for at the state level. These include a requirement to protect teens’ sleep by disabling their ability to scroll through content or receive notifications late at night. Meta must also block notifications during school hours. Under the settlement, teens will have the option to have their feed displayed in reverse chronological order rather than targeted via an algorithmic feed. And the settlement requires other changes beyond those addressed in Brown’s proposed legislation, such as daily time limits for teen use, stronger technology to prevent underage users from creating accounts, and more control for parents who opt to supervise their teen’s accounts.
Brown acknowledged that this problem extends well beyond one company and credited Meta for being the first major platform to reach a comprehensive resolution on youth safety.
The settlement directs the funds to the Attorney General’s Office (AGO), which will use a portion to pay for attorney costs and to fund continued enforcement of consumer protection laws, as well as for programs that address the mental health impacts of youth social media use.
Settlement highlights
The settlement requires Meta to implement a series of safety features on Instagram and Facebook, including:
- Hard cap daily time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for its two platforms, Instagram and Facebook, a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling. These limits remain in effect for five years. If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years.
- “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.
- Eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year.
- Robust age-assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.
- Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm.
- Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.
- Limits on social comparison features, including certain beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in kids and teens.
- Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states.
These are groundbreaking changes to Instagram and Facebook, more significant and comprehensive than any changes previously ordered by any court. Perhaps most importantly, this settlement represents a down payment toward an industry-wide social media experience that allows kids to connect in a healthy way.
Litigation overview
Beginning in 2021, nearly every attorney general in the country cooperated to investigate the social media industry for designing and promoting platforms to children and teens despite known harms.
After a bipartisan, nationwide investigation found that Meta designed Instagram’s features to addict children while internally documenting the resulting mental health harms and failing to warn parents, 48 states sued Meta individually or as part of a consolidated federal lawsuit. This settlement resolves those cases and claims by the other settling states and territories. The settlement also resolves the states’ claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, leading up to the 2016 election. Washington will receive an additional $10.2 million as part of the Cambridge Analytica resolution.
In addition to Brown, the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming joined the settlement.
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