TEENAGERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY will soon have a significantly different experience on Instagram and Facebook, and lawmakers in Massachusetts just got a nine-figure incentive to wrap up their work on a social media bill.
In the midst of a nationwide reckoning over the addictiveness of social media platforms, and with Bay State legislation regulating the industry in negotiations, a coalition of attorneys general announced a massive settlement with tech giant Meta that could inform Bay State debates over how companies can verify the ages of their users without tripping into intrusive data collection.
Meta — which owns social media platforms Facebook and Instagram — is settling a landmark case targeting its design features, Attorney General Andrea Campbell announced Wednesday morning. It will pay $17.1 billion altogether to 47 states and enact major reforms to how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under the terms of the deal awaiting court approval.
Massachusetts is set to receive up to $516 million through the settlement, according to Campbell’s office, including approximately $366 million guaranteed to be paid over the next 10 years.
With the exception of the landmark Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s, Campbell’s office said this is the largest state consumer protection settlement in history.
“The size of the settlement is not what matters most to me or this team,” Campbell said at a press conference Wednesday. “What matters is that this agreement changes what young people will experience when they open their apps. And I want to be clear that today is not the end of this work. It’s just the beginning.”
The deal between Meta and attorneys general across the country landed as Massachusetts lawmakers continue to deliberate about whether to enshrine permanent restrictions on youth social media use in state law.
Under the settlement, users under 13 will be completely banned from using Instagram or Facebook. For 13- to 18-year-old users, the platforms will need to implement new protections and keep them in place for at least five years.
These teen users will only be able to access Instagram and Facebook for up to two hours per day, and will be completely blocked between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. Notifications would also be throttled — shut off entirely between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and silenced during standard school hours of 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Along with mandatory breaks while using the site for teens, Facebook and Instagram will introduce options to disable “autoplay” and algorithmic feed features, which prosecutors have argued contribute to increased time on the platform. The settlement also eliminates some metrics that can create comparison and unhealthy competition between young users, like publicly visible counts of likes and other reactions on teen users’ posts. It would disable filters that mimic cosmetic surgery, in a gesture to the detrimental effects of young people being constantly exposed to idealized faces and bodies.
“These are not simply promises to do better,” Campbell said. “These are changes to the products themselves to start to make things safer for our kids online.”
But the settlement only binds Meta, not other industry giants like Google or TikTok. And the new protections are guaranteed for a limited period of time, unless the parties agree to continue the terms.
Campbell noted that a lawsuit against TikTok is pending. That company is facing similar allegations that it designed its platform to addict young users and exploit their vulnerabilities.
Meta explicitly called for other social media companies to join in its new commitments, rolling out an “open letter” to TikTok and YouTube. (Neither TikTok nor Google, which owns YouTube, responded to CommonWealth Beacon inquiries Wednesday.)
Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the limits on nighttime and school hour alerts “will only work if all our peers join us.”
“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away,” Mahoney said in a statement.
Wednesday’s settlement resolves a 2023 lawsuit in Massachusetts arguing that Meta violated state consumer protection laws and caused a public nuisance by purposefully designing its Instagram app to addict young users. The tech giant unsuccessfully argued before the state Supreme Judicial Court that it was shielded from suit by a federal law that protects publishers from being liable for things that third-party users might post.
“That groundbreaking ruling allowed our case to move forward, and Massachusetts leadership helped create the leverage needed to pave the way for today’s agreement,” Campbell said.
She made clear that she still wants state lawmakers to put permanent, industry-wide restrictions on the books, using Wednesday’s press conference to urge the Legislature to finish its work on youth social media bills as well as an effort to ban student cellphone use during the school day.
“We view the settlement as a floor, and we now see these protections as a floor for other tech companies to begin to redesign their platforms to protect our kids,” Campbell said. “We also see it as an opportunity for the Legislature not only to adopt these provisions as the floor, but to go beyond them.”
Both the House and Senate support taking action to limit social media risks for children and teenagers, but so far, Democrats in the two branches have not yet been able to agree on an approach.
Legislative leaders signaled they will continue to pursue action even with the Meta settlement in place. Senate President Karen Spilka on Wednesday pledged to “build on AG Campbell’s victory and keep working to finalize a comprehensive youth social media protections bill so we can expand upon and implement these protections across the board.”
Sen. Brendan Crighton, who’s leading negotiations over the bills alongside Rep. Alice Peisch, an assistant majority leader on House Speaker Ron Mariano’s leadership team, said the new settlement “bolsters the argument” for legislators to act.
“We were company-neutral in looking at the overall issue around social media in our bill,” Crighton told CommonWealth Beacon. “That was done intentionally, to not go after one company or another.”
“So I don’t think [the settlement] changes our approach,” he added. “Our goal was to create regulations across all platforms, and that remains the goal.”
There’s an unusual clause baked into the agreement that could expand what Meta owes Massachusetts. If other major social media platforms that are not covered by the terms of the settlement, like TikTok and YouTube, implement similar protections for young users and pay the Bay State $150 million, Meta would match that additional funding.
The logic may appear somewhat counterintuitive. But if Meta were the only platform to change its policies, officials said, it would be willing to pay less than it would if the entire industry embraced similar reforms, which minimizes any risk of one company being at a disadvantage. As an AG spokesperson put it, the provision“levels the playing field.”
The requirement could be triggered either by TikTok and YouTube’s voluntary participation, or by legislative action to force every company to play by the same rules.
State lawmakers are already weighing bills that would implement major limits on youth social media use. Now, they could win Massachusetts hundreds of millions of dollars more simply by coming to agreement with each other.
In the meantime, Meta has one year to implement systems to identify users under 13 and users between 13 and 18 with a “high level of accuracy.” The settlement mandates that whatever age verification system is implemented cannot require users to submit government identification or other sensitive information to verify their age, but it does not specify a particular mechanism.
That drops the settlement squarely into an international imbroglio over data privacy and youth safety online.
Online privacy and LGBTQ advocates have criticized similar language in House and Senate social media regulation proposals. Advocacy group Fight for the Future has been calling for lawmakers to strike language requiring social media companies to implement an age assurance system when new accounts are created. This, they say, “would create a substantial barrier for adults to speak anonymously online, raising constitutional and free speech concerns.”
In the Bay State, money paid by Meta will go toward “efforts to remediate the harms caused by social media to Massachusetts young people” as well as to the state’s General Fund. The harm-reduction options may include youth crisis intervention and mental health services; after-school, summer, and outdoor programs; advancing digital wellness and literacy; phone-free school initiatives; and training medical providers on interactive media use and body dysmorphia.
The attorney general also touted agreements to create “enhanced parental supervision tools” allowing parents to turn on protective settings and receive notifications on their teens’ usage, content searches, and contact with adults.
These tools, her office said, would be tied to a unique mechanism. Teen accounts by default would have the strict new limitations, but if they were tethered to a parent’s account, they could have more lenient default protections with the tradeoff of more parental oversight.
In a statement, Mahoney said the negotiated framework “will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms.”
The one-company limitation echoes a settlement in 2024 between Campbell’s office and ride-share tech companies Uber and Lyft, which killed a potential ballot measure to treat drivers for multiple apps – not just Uber and Lyft – as independent contractors in exchange for ending a lawsuit charging the companies with violating state labor law.
While the major industry players Uber and Lyft are bound by the settlement setting new wage and benefit standards, other gig-work companies relying on drivers, like DoorDash and Instacart, were left to operate as usual.
For now, the attorney general’s office and the Legislature are traveling on individual tracks toward similar ends. But the coming months of lawmakers weighing data privacy, social media, and cell phone bills offer plenty of opportunities for policy collisions.
