Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced Wednesday (Aug. 26) a $117 million settlement with tech giant Meta over social media’s harms to teenagers.
The state’s portion is part of a massive, $17.1 billion multistate agreement with Meta under which the social media company must implement sweeping new safety measures for children on its Instagram and Facebook platforms.
Marshall said the landmark settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories “sends a clear message that Alabama will hold big tech accountable when it fails to protect our children online.”
“Meta will pay millions of dollars to Alabama and has taken a critical step toward comprehensive reforms for youth safety,” the attorney general said in a statement. “We will continue to monitor Meta to ensure compliance with the terms set forth in the settlement as well as to close off any loopholes predators and other bad actors might try to exploit.”
Largest deal
It’s the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s, Marshall said in a news release.
The agreement halts an ongoing case in California that argued that Meta designed Instagram and Facebook to harm children through addictive features on the platforms.
As part of the agreement, Meta will implement a series of changes intended to protect children online, including adding daily time limits of up to 2 hours on Instagram and Facebook and enacting mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use.
Meta will also restrict teens from using the platforms overnight from midnight to 6 a.m. Children will not receive push notifications during school hours except about account security or safety.
Those under 18 years old will not be able to see “like” counts on social media posts and will not be able to use cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup filters. Parental controls will also be strengthened under the settlement.
“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,” C.J. Mahoney, chief legal officer at Meta, said in a blog post. “The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms.”
Online safety initiatives
The $117,345,409 settlement in Alabama, which can be used for youth online safety initiatives in the state, will be distributed in annual installments over 10 years.
If YouTube and TikTok follow suit and implement online safety restrictions for teens and match 30% or $5.3 billion of the total settlement amount, Alabama and other states in the agreement will receive their maximum portion of the $17 billion settlement.
In Alabama, that could mean an additional $50.6 million for a total of $167.9 million if TikTok and YouTube agree to those two conditions.
Meta encouraged the other major tech companies to agree to those children’s online safety changes to ensure industry-wide measures are in place to protect teens.
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution,” Mahoney said.
Earlier this year, Marshall announced a $12.2 million settlement with the popular video game Roblox over child safety concerns. On Monday, the Alabama attorney general subpoenaed OpenAI in an ongoing investigation over an incident in which one of the company’s models hacked into a different AI company’s infrastructure.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Alex Angle and originally published by Alabama Daily News.
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