Voluntary legal settlements involve compromises by plaintiffs and defendants. No party gets everything it originally wanted or sought to forestall. Advocacy groups with mission-driven interests in a case’s outcome rarely are satisfied.
These realities arise when evaluating a consent judgment and related settlement agreement filed on August 26 in federal court in Oakland, California. They resolve the harms-to-minors claims of four dozen states (plus the District of Columbia and three territories) against Meta Platforms. The agreement came during the second week of a bellwether trial involving four states (California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey) “seeking roughly $200 billion in penalties and changes to the company’s platforms.”
Approved by Chief District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, the settlement addresses claims that Meta used its technology and Facebook and Instagram platforms “to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens,” causing myriad mental health injuries. Three categories of allegations underpinning the case asserted that Meta: (1) made deceptive statements regarding risks and potential harms of its platforms; (2) engaged in unfair trade practices by deploying features that “induce compulsive use in” minors; and (3) violated a federal law by collecting data from minors under age 13 without parental consent.
Meta was the lone defendant. Its primary competitors—the agreement dubs them “core industry members”—Google (YouTube) and TikTok weren’t parties to the litigation.
Yet, Meta wants them to adopt some of the same changes it agreed to make for Facebook and Instagram, ostensibly for “ensuring [that] teens receive consistent protections across the apps they use most.” Of course, if Google and TikTok were to make the same changes in level-the-playing-field fashion, it would reduce competitive disadvantages Meta might suffer as the only major platform to embrace them.
The settlement features injunctive measures (design and feature changes) and monetary compensation (potentially more than $17 billion paid by Meta over 10 years, but less than $13 billion if rivals Google and TikTok don’t buy into facets of the settlement). Specifically, if Google and TikTok make three key changes that Meta is making to Facebook and Instagram and if they each contribute about $5.3 billion to the same fund, then Meta will pony up a similar amount to reach the $17 billion-plus figure.
This contingency provision may incentivize Google and TikTok to take an off-ramp from potential future litigation by the states. As Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr likes to say, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Google and TikTok can now pay about $5.3 billion to the states and make some design changes or be sued later, forcing them to probably spend millions on attorneys’ fees and litigation costs while rival Meta merrily positions itself as “set[ting] a new industry standard.”
The threat of litigation against Google and TikTok, as well as Snap, is real. As Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday said after Meta settled, “our battle does not end here; we remain engaged with other social media and big tech companies to make changes, and we will not stand down.”
Meta is making two changes involving social comparison features that ostensibly harm some teens’ sense of their self-worth. These include hiding from “teen users” (those with an actual or Meta-predicted age of 13 to 17 years) the “numbers of likes or reactions” to their posts (unless a “supervising parent” says otherwise) and blocking them from using any cosmetic procedure filter “that distorts, sculpts, redefines, or idealizes a user’s face in a way that cannot be achieved without cosmetic surgery or extreme makeup techniques.”
Among other changes, Meta agreed to: (1) impose a collective two-hour daily time limit for teen users across Facebook and Instagram; (2) implement a night mode barring, by default, teen users from accessing the platforms between midnight and 6:00 a.m.; (3) disable push notifications during school hours (8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., Monday through Friday) unless adjusted by a supervising parent; (4) offer teens a non-personalized feed that delivers content chronologically; and (5) improve age-assurance methods to better bar all users under age 13 and identify teen users claiming to be adults. Meta is withholding approximately $5.3 billion until both Google and TikTok implement similar daily time limits, night-mode blocks, and improved age-assurance measures.
Some criticisms are that: (1) Meta pays too little relative to its market capitalization; (2) enhanced age-assurance mechanisms may jeopardize privacy and anonymity; (3) some platform changes wouldn’t pass First Amendment muster if they were compelled by a statute, and thus “the government could never legislate” them; and (4) the settlement amounts to “regulatory capture via litigation.”
Ultimately, this is all a 10-year experiment. Meta’s obligations expire after that, and Google and TikTok may not embrace Meta’s call for “industry-wide adoption.” For now, Meta sits pretty while the attorneys general take public victory laps for helping minors and parents.