Meta will pay up to $18 billion and limit teen time on Facebook and Instagram

OAKLAND, Calif. — Meta agreed Wednesday to pay as much as $18 billion and to put hard time limits on teenagers using Facebook and Instagram, settling claims by nearly every U.S. state that it designed those products to addict children and then lied about the harm.

The main deal covers 47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, with a maximum payout of about $16.7 billion over a decade. Texas struck a separate agreement worth more than $1 billion. Together they are being described, not without reason, as the largest state consumer-protection settlement since Big Tobacco.

What the states bought besides money

Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, who has spent years on this case, said the point was not a round number. It was the product. Nighttime alerts off. School-hour alerts off. Breaks that interrupt the scroll. “The agreement exceeded what most courts might order,” he said.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office published the mechanics: a combined two-hour daily limit on Instagram and Facebook for children, with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes. Those caps last five years. If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform drops to 60 minutes for ten years.

The focus of this case was to protect our kids: stopping notifications and alerts at night and when they are in school.— Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser

That last clause is the tell. Meta is not merely paying a fine. It is daring its rivals to join a cartel of restraint, with $5 billion of its own money riding on whether they do. A settlement that shrinks if the rest of the industry refuses to behave is a settlement that has priced in the possibility that nothing much changes.

The trial that ended before the number

Four states — California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey — had been heading toward a bellwether trial in the Northern District of California. They were prepared to ask for something on the order of $200 billion. Meta, in its telling, said some states had demanded more than $1.4 trillion, a figure so large it functions as public relations.

Wednesday’s filing ended that trial. It also folded in, Reuters reported, older privacy claims tied to Cambridge Analytica from California, Illinois, New Mexico, and Washington, D.C. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act claims — that Meta collected data from users it knew were children, without parental consent, and used it to train machine-learning systems — were part of the pile.

Meta’s share price rose as much as 4.1 percent and closed up 1.1 percent. Markets have a simple model of justice: a known bill is better than an unknown one. Parents have a different model. They will find out, in about a school year, whether a default two-hour cap is a product change or a setting a fourteen-year-old can talk a tired adult into disabling.

Desk note. We are using “up to $18 billion” because that is the sum of the maximum state payments plus Texas. The cash that lands in treasuries may be several billion lower if the industry-wide clause kicks in. When states publish their individual allocations, we will add them to this file.