By Joshua HongNews FellowDown Arrow Button IconBy Joshua HongNews FellowDown Arrow Button IconAugust 26, 2026, 10:42 AM ETMeta will beat its previous record for highest privacy settlement for big tech in the past four years.Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Meta agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion over the next decade to settle a landmark child-safety lawsuit brought about by 29 state Attorneys General, co-led by California’s Rob Bonta. The suit alleged Meta designed Instagram with intentionally addictive features and exposed younger users to serious mental harms while misleading the public about the platform’s safety. In addition to the payout, the social media company will make sweeping changes to its platform, including a default two-hour daily time limit on Facebook and Instagram for under-18 users, and will bring on an independent auditor.
Meta’s settlement comes in as one of the largest of its kind. The agreement puts the social media giant’s payment at over 12-times higher than the previous highest settlement in the past four years—a mark Meta itself kept up to that point with its $1.4 billion settlement in 2024. At up-to $17.1 billion, state attorneys general describe it as the largest state consumer-protection settlement outside of the tobacco settlements of the 1990s—and it is the largest settlement ever reached with a single company in the New York attorney general’s office (the previous being in 2022 with the state’s $7.4 billion settlement with Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family over the opioid crisis).
