SALT LAKE CITY — Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has settled its social media lawsuit with Utah and other states for billions of dollars and agreed to implement numerous safeguards for child users.
Utah will get $212 million over the next 10 years out of $12.2 billion going to numerous states. That number will balloon up to $17 billion if other tech platforms, like Snap, TikTok and YouTube agree to "substantially similar" injunctive terms.
Meta was scheduled to go to trial in Salt Lake City in November in the Utah Division of Consumer Protection's lawsuit against it. Within hours of the settlement being announced in a court filing by the Utah Attorney General's Office and Meta, Judge Thaddeus May signed an order vacating all future hearings and deadlines.
Meta has agreed to new conditions for child and teen accounts. They include:
- Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.
- A combined two-hour daily time limit across Instagram and Facebook, with mandatory “Productive Pause” breaks after 15, 60, and 90 minutes of continuous use, in effect for five years, and dropping to 60 minutes per platform for 10 years if Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms.
- “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
- No push notifications to children on school-year weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and late at night.
- An option for a non-personalized algorithmic feed to users under 18.
- Age-appropriate content controls, with stronger safeguards against bullying and content promoting eating disorders, suicide, and self-harm.
- Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.
- Limits on social-comparison features linked to poor youth mental health, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts.
- Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states.
"Meta has had the power to put in place all of these features all along and they have not done it because they have been prioritizing profits," Utah Department of Commerce Commissioner Margaret Woolley Busse said in an interview Wednesday with FOX 13 News.
It stems from lawsuits Utah and other states have filed, alleging Meta crafted addictive algorithms and other features that harmed the mental health of youth. Governor Spencer Cox has waged a long-running war with social media platforms, accusing them of causing significant damage.
"I've said for years we need to hold social media accountable. This is a big first step in doing exactly that," Gov. Cox told FOX 13 News.
The governor said he wanted more in the settlement and more concessions from Meta, but he was most happy with "age-gating" the platforms.
"I wanted to turn the algorithms off completely for kids. We didn’t get that far. But we did get the option for kids to opt-into an algorithm that doesn’t use their data that isn’t specific to them," Gov. Cox said in a brief interview Wednesday.
The governor said he will recommend the legislature allocate the money from the settlement for youth programs. Gov. Cox still said he would not recommend any child use these apps, even with the new changes that will be rolled out.
"I would encourage parents, what’s better than these platforms with these restrictions being implemented? Is not being on those platforms at all. We should keep kids off these as long as we possibly can. We should keep these phones and platforms out of school," he said.
In its own statement, Meta characterized its changes under the settlement as "building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens."
"Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta. 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," the company said.
Meta went further to call on TikTok and YouTube to do similar.
"While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day. All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another," the company said.
Commissioner Busse, whose Division of Consumer Protection will be monitoring Meta, said she expected Meta's settlement to increase pressure on other tech companies.
"I think this puts enormous pressure on the whole industry because now that Meta has agreed to these terms, we expect we’ll be able to work with these other companies. But we don’t know. We don’t know how TikTok and Snap and Google is going to react," she said.
Utah has continued litigation against TikTok and Snap.
The impact to Utah's youth from the settlement will be a positive one, said Emily Bell McCormick, the president of The Policy Project, which successfully lobbied the Utah State Legislature to pass a bill banning cell phones in classrooms bell-to-bell. At the start of the school year? Students were forced to put away their phones.
She viewed the two issues as important for the social and mental development of teens.
"It’s hugely disruptive for kids to have a phone whether that’s in school, whether that’s at home," she told FOX 13 News on Wednesday. "They’re more lonely, there’s more bullying. There’s an increase in self-consciousness. All of these things that are more detrimental to kids have increased since social media and smartphones."
