Roughly two weeks into a trial that was expected to run through early October, Meta and a coalition of state attorneys general told Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California that they had a deal. The billions dollars settlement will resolve the many claims about harm to young people lodged against Meta but the injunctive relief will redefine the product itself, and change the way marketers and advertisers use Meta.
The Settlement.
Attorneys general from nearly every state, the District of Columbia, and five territories participated. Reported state counts vary across coverage; the AG offices themselves describe a coalition covering all fifty states plus territories, led by California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The claims against Meta were grounded in state consumer protection laws and the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act but the theory itself was design based, alleging that Meta engineered Facebook and Instagram to be compulsive for minors and misrepresented what it knew about the resulting harm.
Under the proposed settlement, Meta will pay a guaranteed base of approximately $12.19 billion over ten years. The figure escalates to as much as $17.1 billion if TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube adopt comparable safeguards. Several states have earmarked large shares — Connecticut, for example, has committed at least half of its allocation to youth mental health programming, after-school services, and phone-free school initiatives. The settlement is still subject to court approval.
Six Categories of Reform: The injunctive terms fall into six categories, most of which must go live within four to six months.
- Age assurance. Meta must implement an enhanced age assurance framework capable of distinguishing under-13 users from the 13–18 users. This must be done without requiring government ID or comparable sensitive documentation. Users identified as under 13 are removed from both Instagram and Facebook.
- Time and attention limits. Meta will set up a default two-hour combined daily limit across Instagram and Facebook for users under 18, overridable only by a parent. There are mandatory break prompts at 15, 60, and 90 minutes of continuous use, a nighttime block from midnight to 6:00 a.m., and notification blackouts overnight and on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year.
- Algorithm controls. Minors get access to a non-personalized, chronological feed option, and parents get the ability to disable algorithmic ranking and autoplay outright.
- Social comparison features. Like and reaction counts must be hidden on minors’ posts, cosmetic surgery filters blocked for minors, and age-appropriate content controls covering bullying, disordered eating, and self-harm material will be implemented.
- Defaults and contact restrictions. Teen accounts will be private-by-default teen, there will be tightened restrictions on adult contact with minors and expanded parental supervision tools covering screen time, search visibility, and contact transparency.
- Oversight and truthfulness. An independent auditor will get broad access to assess both implementation and effectiveness, with ongoing state oversight. Meta is also enjoined from making false claims about the safety of its platforms — which is, functionally, a claims-substantiation order applied to a technology company’s public statements.
How Will This Affect Advertisers and Marketers?
- Reduced Inventory. The effect of a two-hour default cap, a six-hour overnight block, and a school-day notification blackout is that entire day hours are removed from the ad inventory. A media plan assuming current youth impression volume on Meta properties no longer valid as the impressions will change drastically.
- Age as a Requirement. Age assurance will reclassify users who currently sit in adult buckets. Some of your 18–24 audience is about to become 13–17 audience, with the targeting restrictions that carries. Meta has limited under-18 targeting to essentially age and location since 2023 — no interest, behavioral, lookalike, or custom-audience signals. Better age detection expands the population to which those restrictions apply, potentially reducing audience sizes.
- Creator and influencer programs lose a core measurement. If you have influencer programs that include under 18s, hiding the “like” counts may remove the social proof that many influencer contracts price against. Default private accounts change what “organic” looks like. Further, brand-owned effects and filters deserve a fresh look too — the cosmetic-surgery filter restriction is narrow on its face, but it signals where platform enforcement on appearance-altering creative content may be going.
- The enforcement rulebook is public. Independent auditing, design-level mandates, and an injunction against overstating safety — this is a roadmap that other AG’s will use, and not only against platforms. If your marketing makes wellbeing, safety, or “designed for kids” claims, assume that substantiation will be imperative.
What Should Marketers and Advertisers Do Now?
- Find out where minors are in your audience, not where you intend them to be as intent won’t be a defense. Look at delivered impressions and not planned targeting.
- The two hour cap, overnight block and school day notifications should be built in to your media plans now.
- Take a look at the deliverables and compensation in your influencer contracts to determine what if any engagement metrics might be obsolete now. If those engagement metrics don’t exist anymore, what other changes to those agreements need to be made?
- Are you using appearance altering creative? Take stock of your owned AR effects and make sure they comply with the settlement’s restrictions.
- At what point does the age category data enter your stack, who touches it, how long do you keep it, and can you document deletion? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act will be watching this as will App store accountability statutes.
- Can you substantiate your youth- appropriate claims against these new rules? Substantiate every safety, wellness, and youth-appropriateness claim in your own marketing. These should be treated as seriously as if a health claim is being made.
- It seems every new development in this space materially affects your client and third party agreements. Most MSA’s or SOW’s are pretty silent as to who absorbs the cost when a platform changes its policies, so ensure you have a compliance change provision and adequate risk allocation provisions.
Stay Tuned… The settlement requires court approval, and the operative terms will be governed by the final judgment rather than by the latest press releases. Implementation guidance from Meta has not issued. Whether TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube adopt comparable measures is an open question with a $5 billion answer attached to it, and separate litigation against those platforms continues. What is clear however, is that regulators have stopped asking platforms to moderate content and have started requiring them to change product design. Every business that reaches young audiences through those products will feel, and in fact be responsible to implement, these consequences.
For more information about how the settlement may affect your business, contact Ashley Brooks at ABrooks@RothJackson.com.
