OAKLAND, Calif. — Kids under 18 will soon see a host of changes to their Instagram and Facebook experiences thanks to a historic $18 billion settlement Meta Platforms reached Wednesday with 48 U.S. states.

Besides the money, which will be paid out over a decade, Meta has agreed to strengthen its age estimates to keep kids under 13 off its platforms and teens in age-appropriate accounts, enact a hard limit of two hours a day for users under 18, block kids from the apps from midnight to 6 a.m., and hide “like” counts, among other changes.

Meta said the new safeguards will only apply in the United States, with most in place for 10 years.

Under the settlement, Delaware will receive a guaranteed $73.6 million over the next 10 years, beginning with an $11 million payment this year, according to a news release from Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings.

The first-year payment includes a one-time monetary settlement of $4.2 million related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Under a contingency in the agreement, Meta will pay Delaware an additional $30 million, and nearly another $5 billion nationally, if other social media platforms—namely TikTok and YouTube—reach similar agreements with the states. In addition to the payment, Meta must implement a sweeping set of safety features designed to protect children on Instagram and Facebook.

“Our goal in this litigation was not just punitive. It was to create change,” said Jennings in a prepared statement. “Beyond the money, this agreement includes massive structural changes to the way that Meta targets young adults, which for years now has been addictive by design. We’ve seen up close how these apps have harmed kids, from youth who have suffered psychological harm, to those who have died by suicide, to those who have lost their lives or freedom because of crime that escalated over Instagram.”

Roughly 75% of the monetary payments from Meta to settle this suit—over $50 million—will go toward teen health and safety, including but not limited to services for at-risk and justice involved youth, crisis intervention services, after school programs, and educational grants, the Delaware news release said. The remainder of the recurring payments will go to the Delaware Consumer Protection Fund, which funds the DOJ’s consumer protection, housing justice, and economic law enforcement work, including consumer fraud targeting young adults.

Caution

While acknowledging the changes go further than Meta has ever gone when it comes to child safety, critics and children’s advocates cautioned that they won’t solve its myriad problems overnight.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, said the settlement is a “significant milestone,” but parents should not see Instagram as suddenly safe for children.
“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview Wednesday. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”

Béjar, the first witness to testify during the federal trial cut short by the settlement, would like to see Meta address the effect of content recommendations on teens, which he says can prove addictive. While teens might put their phone down when they hit the two-hour limit, they can be distressed about it because the way the platform is designed leaves them craving more.

Meta said people over 18 also can adopt versions of the new controls individually, such as daily time-limit reminders, but there will not be an option for them to opt into the overall settings for what teens experience on the platform.

Stronger age checks

To protect kids, first Meta has to know who they are. While the company has already been using artificial intelligence to determine if kids are lying about their age — either to sign up if they are under 13, which is not allowed, or to use adult accounts when they are 13 to 17 — the AI did not always work.

Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to strengthen its age-checking technology using its own as well as third-party tools, with regular outside audits on how well it is working. The agreement also includes specific goals around false positive rates — that is, minors who are identified as over 18. And if a user is identified as under 13 and kicked off the platforms, Meta will check the ages of their friends, too.

“The age assurance section is reasonably good because it has measurement, has independent testing, has goals,” Béjar said. “Because I think Meta should be measured on effectiveness, not effort.”

Federal child privacy law requires users to be at least 13 to create an account, but Béjar testified last week that Meta took a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach.

“Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world to detect fake accounts,” he said, but Meta had “no goals, no metrics” to detect and check the ages of kids suspected to be under 13.

Some safety features

Critics have faulted Meta over many of its safety features that users have to manually turn on, or opt into themselves.

Of the host of safeguards listed in the settlement, many will now be on as a default. This includes the two-hour time limit, which can only be turned off with a parent’s permission, as well as the night mode that blocks use between midnight and 6 a.m.

Still, under the agreement other features will be opt-in, such as turning off video autoplay or showing posts in chronological order rather than having algorithms decide what to show kids scrolling through their feeds.

Josh Golin, executive director of the online safety nonprofit Fairplay, said the deal appears too focused on offering tools to parents rather than restricting harmful features altogether.

“We are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes,” Golin said.

Questions around default settings came up at the trial this week when a lawyer for the states suing Meta pressed Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, on the low adoption rate among teens for the “take a break” feature, which prompts users to step away after scrolling a while.

Very few teens used the feature when Instagram first introduced it, but since launching separate teen accounts in 2024, Meta has made it the default setting for teenage users. Still, if a teen didn’t want to take a break, they could simply swipe away the notification.