Meta has agreed to pay billions of dollars and change how minors use Facebook and Instagram under a sweeping settlement with 52 attorneys general, including Alabama.
The company is also using the agreement to pressure TikTok and YouTube to accept similar restrictions, arguing that protections imposed on one platform will have limited effect if teenagers simply move to another.
The agreement announced Wednesday includes 48 states, the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories. It remains subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.
The settlement resolves claims that Meta designed Facebook and Instagram with features intended to keep children online, exposed young users to harmful content and misled parents and the public about the platforms’ safety. The states also alleged that Meta collected personal information from children under 13 without obtaining the parental consent required under federal law.
Meta does not admit liability or wrongdoing under the proposed consent judgment.
State attorneys general valued the settlement at up to $17.1 billion, with at least $12.1 billion guaranteed to participating jurisdictions. Meta described the agreement as worth approximately $18 billion, with about $5.3 billion contingent on TikTok and YouTube adopting comparable protections and making matching payments.
The money will be distributed over 10 years. State officials said the funds are intended to support youth mental-health services, digital-literacy initiatives, school programs and other efforts addressing harmful social-media use.
Meta’s announcement did not specify how much Alabama will receive.
The agreement imposes substantial changes on Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to users under 18.
Teen users will be placed under a combined two-hour daily limit across the two platforms. Meta must count time across multiple accounts when it determines that those accounts belong to the same young person.
Teens cannot disable the limit without parental permission. Direct-messaging features are excluded so users can continue communicating with friends and family.
A default “Night Mode” will block access to feeds, stories, Reels and other platform features between midnight and 6 a.m. Push notifications will be muted during school hours—generally from 8 a.m. until 3 p.m.—with limited exceptions for direct messages and account-security alerts.
Young users will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous use and additional reminders when they reach 60 and 90 minutes of total daily use.
Meta must also strengthen its age-assurance systems, expand parental controls and restrict accounts suspected of attempting inappropriate contact with minors.
Teen users will be able to choose a chronological feed rather than one personalized by Meta’s recommendation algorithms. Parents will be able to require that setting on supervised accounts.
Visible “like” and reaction counts will be hidden by default. Meta must continue blocking cosmetic-surgery filters for minors and expand that prohibition to include extreme-makeup filters.
The company must also maintain safeguards intended to reduce teens’ exposure to bullying, eating-disorder content, self-harm material and other age-inappropriate content.
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the agreement would give parents greater authority over how their children use the company’s platforms.
“The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” Mahoney said. “Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us.”
Meta specifically called on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same framework.
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said. “We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away.”
The agreement also ties a portion of Meta’s potential payment to whether TikTok and YouTube adopt comparable protections.
Approximately $5.3 billion would be released only if the two companies implement comparable time limits, nighttime restrictions and age-assurance measures—and each makes a matching payment.
The restrictions on Meta would also become stronger if other major platforms enter similar settlements. The daily limit would fall to one hour per Meta platform, nighttime restrictions would expand from 10 p.m. until 7 a.m., and those requirements would remain in place for 10 years.
Most other provisions of the agreement are already scheduled to remain in effect for a decade.
The settlement will also establish an independent research foundation examining social media and teen well-being. An independent auditor will review Meta’s compliance annually for five years and report its findings to participating states.
Meta said it expects to record an approximately $10 billion legal expense during the third quarter of 2026 because of the agreement.
Attorneys general described the settlement as one of the largest state consumer-protection agreements in American history outside the tobacco settlements of the 1990s.
The agreement converts many child-safety tools previously offered as voluntary options into default protections backed by court enforcement. For now, those obligations apply only to Meta. TikTok and YouTube are not parties to the settlement and have not agreed to the framework Meta is urging them to adopt.
