Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta will pay $18 billion to settle a federal lawsuit accusing it of fueling a teen mental health crisis, but nearly a third of that sum depends on whether TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt the same safeguards. The social media giant is now directly calling on its largest competitors to follow Zuckerberg’s lead.
The settlement announced just days into a trial brought by a coalition of state attorneys general, resolves claims that Meta hooked children on its platforms and ignored the resulting harms, including anxiety, depression and suicide, to protect its profits. Meta will pay 70 percent of the total, about $12.7 billion, upfront. The remaining $5.3 billion only gets released if TikTok and Google’s YouTube together pay a matching $5.3 billion and adopt the same restrictions Meta is imposing on itself.
Those required changes include a one-hour daily usage limit for teens, a “night mode” that blocks access during bedtime hours, and age verification measures. Meta agreed to a two-hour daily limit for teens on Facebook and Instagram, which would drop to one hour if TikTok and YouTube fall in line. The night mode default would block teen access from midnight to 6:00 a.m. Most provisions in the settlement are set to last 10 years.
Meta is also banning filters for “cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup,” removing “Likes” and other reactions from teen posts by default, and strengthening parental oversight tools. The settlement leaves Meta’s recommendation algorithm, the system that decides what content teens see, untouched.
Meta published an open letter calling out its rivals directly, writing that “these protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place.” As of Wednesday afternoon, neither company had responded, despite multiple requests for comment. TikTok recently settled a separate, unrelated case with the DOJ for $400 million over children’s privacy.
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney commented:
I’m pleased to announce that Meta has reached an agreement with a bipartisan group of state attorneys general from around the country on a new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media. The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms. 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. Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away. As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement. But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead.
The $18 billion figure dwarfs the $5 billion fine the FTC hit Meta with back in 2019. But set against the company’s scale, it barely registers: at Meta’s fiscal 2025 revenue of $200.1 billion, the settlement amounts to about 33 days of income.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.