Illinois to receive up to $768M in Meta settlement over teen social media addiction

CHICAGO — Illinois will receive up to $768 million from a multi-state $17.1 billion settlement with social media giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — the culmination of a three-year legal battle brought by state attorneys general.

Nearly three dozen AGs, including Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, sued Meta in 2023 over teen social media addiction, following a two-year investigation into decisions made by company executives to encourage more engagement on its social media platforms. The lawsuits alleged engineers greenlit more addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay despite internal company research showing the harms of compulsive social media use on teens’ brains, in addition to misleading the public about the safety of its platforms.

“This is a monumental victory for online safety that will affect an entire generation of young people,” Raoul said in a statement. “After decades of putting profits before the health and wellness of children, this landmark settlement requires Meta to put our children’s safety and mental health at the forefront.”

The settlement, announced Wednesday, abruptly ended what was supposed to be the first of several trials spawned by the AGs’ litigation. Illinois was not one of the four states acting as plaintiffs in the federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been expected to take the witness stand.

Details of the settlement

Though the settlement still faces court approval, the $17.1 billion agreed to is one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history. Illinois will receive up to $768 million over a 10-year period, which will be used for youth mental health and online safety training programs. In similar multi-state settlements with tobacco and opioid manufacturers, Illinois has used its share of settlement funds to stand up addiction recovery programs.

But the Meta settlement goes beyond money; the company agreed to strengthen its existing age verification systems for users in addition to a host of limitations for those between 13 and 18.

Meta debuted Instagram “teen accounts” nearly two years ago, which automatically placed privacy and content restrictions on users under 16 years, in addition to gentle reminders to get off the app after 60 minutes and a default “sleep mode,” which silences notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

However, age verification isn’t iron-clad, and some limitations are easily turned off. Under the terms of the settlement, teens will have two-hour daily limits on Instagram and Facebook in addition to mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use, and again after 60 and 90 minutes.

The settlement will also supercharge “sleep mode” to a full-on nighttime block restricting teens’ access to content feeds from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. Muted notifications will be extended from “sleep mode” into weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school year.

Meta will also implement stronger safeguards to block teens from accessing content related to eating disorders, suicide and other self-harm, in addition to restricting teens from access to so-called “beauty filters” and “like” counts.

The settlement also dictates that for the first five years of the agreement, an independent auditor will review Meta’s implementation of the changes and their effectiveness.

New Illinois law

Some of the settlement’s terms were already signed into law in Illinois earlier this summer, though the Children’s Social Media Safety Act isn’t set to take effect until 2028. The new law, pushed by Gov. JB Pritzker this spring, prohibits social media platforms from sending notifications to minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.

Read more: Pritzker signs law regulating how social media platforms interact with children

But Illinois’ law also goes further, requiring social media platforms to confirm a user’s age through the operating system of the device — like a smartphone — on which they are using the account. It also prohibits companies from using a minor’s data to curate the content they are served on an app, a tactic deployed by nearly all social media platforms to make scrolling their feeds more addictive.

Under the law, violators face civil penalties of up to $2,500 for each child for unintentional violations and up to $7,500 per child for intentional violations.

State Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, D-Glenview, the lead House sponsor of the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, said this week’s settlement is “an important first step, but not the last, in holding social media companies accountable for the real-world harm that has been a feature of these platforms, not a bug.”

She noted Meta’s challenge to TikTok and YouTube baked into the settlement: Meta will hold back 30% of the settlement — about $5.3 billion — that it will pay out only if the other two platforms also pay roughly $5.3 billion each to fund youth online safety programs and implement their own limitations on teens. Those include restricted night modes, age verification measures and daily one-hour time limits. If TikTok and YouTube adopt those same time limits for teens, Meta will also halve its daily usage limit to an hour.

“Notably, even Meta now says other platforms like TikTok and YouTube should be held to the same standard — proof that these protections are necessary, not optional, and that no company should be trusted to make that call on its own,” Gong-Gershowitz told Capitol News Illinois.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.