Statement from Sacha Haworth, Executive Director of The Tech Oversight Project:

“Twenty-nine attorneys general dragged Meta into court and forced it to protect our kids — overnight shutoffs, daily limits our kids can’t loosen without a parent, and an independent monitor watching Meta’s books for a decade. Meta must now pay over $12 billion to states to fund things like after-school and summer programs, public health ads, a digital wellness public education fund, and youth mental health programs. Meta is also now banned from lying about the effectiveness of its youth safety tools.

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. 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. We call upon the Senate Judiciary Committee to make good on Chairman Chuck Grassley’s commitment to parents by subpoenaing Mark Zuckerberg and other Big Tech CEOs to answer for their dangerous products and for lying to the public.”

What this settlement does:

• Guarantees $12.19 billion to the states. Of that money, $11.66B will be paid out over ten annual installments, $459.3M will be paid out for the Cambridge Analytica settlement, and a $75M fund will be created to administer the settlement. The maximum pay out can increase to $17.22B if certain contingencies are met.
• Imposes court-enforceable teen safety defaults on Instagram and Facebook for 10 years, including a 12 a.m.–6 a.m. teen lockout, a 2-hour cross-app daily cap, school-hours notification blackouts, hidden like counts, a cosmetic-filter ban, and a chronological non-personalized feed option.
• Requires age assurance with accuracy targets. Meta will use commercially available methods that must hit a U18 false-positive rate of “10% for minors aged 16-17 and 3% for minors aged 13-15” within a year, with annual third-party testing and audited under-13 detection and removal targets.
• Creates independent oversight paid for by Meta. There will be a mutually selected Independent Auditor with access to “raw data; aggregated data; information; internal documents and communications”, annual reports with public executive summaries, mandatory corrective action plans, and “Meta shall pay all reasonable and necessary fees and costs.”
• Bans Meta from making deceptive safety claims. Meta “is enjoined from making false, misleading, or deceptive representations regarding the effect or efficacy of safety features for Teen Users.”
• Gives parents real controls. For safety standards to be loosed on a child or teens account, approval will be required from parents, including alerts on first teen–adult contact and on “repeated searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm, or eating disorders.”
• Directs money toward youth remediation. Fund paid out in the settlement will be used for purposes that include “the expansion and operation of the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline,” “youth mental health programming,” and “digital literacy counselors or… phone-free school zones,” with at least 50% certified as “compensatory restitution and remediation.”
• Let state Attorneys General enforce quickly in emergencies. A state may act “without delay if the settling state believes that a threat to the health or safety of the public requires immediate action,” and courts retain jurisdiction to enforce.