(The Center Square) – In a landmark $17.1 billion multistate settlement with Meta Platforms, Inc., Washington state is guaranteed to receive $237 million, with the potential to collect up to nearly $339 million over the next decade.
The agreement resolves claims by 46 states and several U.S. territories alleging that Meta intentionally designed Instagram and Facebook with addictive features, illegally collected preteen data and exposed young users to mental health risks.
The resolution addresses widespread concerns regarding the impact of social media algorithms on youth mental health.
“This agreement shows that your health and safety is more important than Meta’s profits,” Attorney General Nick Brown stated in the official announcement. “We’ve delivered a transformative settlement that will help break compulsive screen use and allow kids across our state to live healthier lives, with more time for sleep, learning, and building social skills.”
For Meta, the total amount is 8.5% of its $201 billion in 2025 revenue.
“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said in a statement. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.”
Washington’s portion of the recovery will cover attorney costs, fund consumer protection enforcement and support state programs addressing the mental health impacts of youth social media use, according to the release.
Under the terms of the resolution, Meta will implement several platform changes on Instagram and Facebook aimed at restricting minor usage and altering default features.
Minor accounts will face a combined two-hour daily time limit across both platforms, complete with mandatory “Productive Pauses” every 15 minutes of continuous scrolling and additional breaks at 60 and 90 minutes.
To protect sleep and classroom focus, push notifications are prohibited during weekday school hours between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m., while access will be blocked overnight from midnight to 6 a.m. Teens will also gain the option to view feeds in reverse chronological order rather than relying on algorithmic recommendations.
Additionally, the settlement mandates stricter age verification, stronger parental supervision tools and restrictions on features linked to poor mental health, such as beauty filters and public “like” counts.
Compliance with these operational changes will be monitored by an independent auditor alongside state regulators. Meta also called on other companies such as TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar provisions.
The left-leaning digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation blasted the settlement in a press release.
“Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play,” the statement said. “The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta’s harmful surveillance into law, and it will compromise users’ privacy and anonymity while increasing their exposure to data breaches and government data requests.”