Meta Platforms agreed on 26 August 2026 to pay US states and territories billions of dollars and change the default settings for users under 18 on Facebook and Instagram, cutting short a trial in Oakland federal court that had been hearing evidence since 18 August and was scheduled to run into October. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the US District Court for the Northern District of California must approve the consent judgment before it binds the company.
Rob Bonta, the California attorney general, announced the agreement as a $17 billion settlement signed by 51 attorneys general representing states, territories and the District of Columbia, with California, Colorado, Tennessee, Kentucky and New Jersey as lead states. Meta's own announcement, published the same day, put the payment at "approximately $18 billion" spread over 10 years, split into about $12.7 billion going to the participating states and about $5.3 billion contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting equivalent teen protections and making matching payments. Reuters, citing a court filing earlier on 26 August, reported a maximum of $16.68 billion.
Reported figures ranged from $16.68 billion to $18 billion and state counts from 29 to 51 across the Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, TechCrunch, CNBC and Forbes. Of the total, $12.7 billion is guaranteed, $5.3 billion arrives only if TikTok and YouTube adopt the same standard, and the $16.68 billion Reuters reported came from a filing made before the announcement. The 2023 complaint was filed by 29 states, which took Meta to trial; 51 attorneys general signed the settlement, including territories and the District of Columbia.
California is set to receive between $1.5 billion and $2.1 billion depending on court approval, earmarked in Bonta's announcement for mental health and social media harm prevention. Virginia's share is $353 million. Meta told investors it expects to accrue roughly $10 billion in legal expenses in the third quarter of 2026. Meta shares rose more than 4 per cent in pre-market trading after the deal was reported. The company reported revenue of $201 billion in 2025.
What changes on the platforms
Default settings on both apps change for users under 18 within months of approval. A two-hour cumulative daily limit across Facebook and Instagram applies unless a parent lifts it. Night Mode blocks the apps from midnight to 6am. Notifications are muted overnight and during school hours, set at 8am to 3pm between 15 August and 15 June. Prompts appear after 15 minutes of continuous use. Teens get a feed option that runs without personalised ranking and the ability to switch off autoplay. Like and reaction counts are hidden. Cosmetic surgery filters are blocked. Age checks tighten, with removal procedures for accounts held by children under 13, whose data collection formed the states' claim under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. Reports submitted by teen users must draw a response within six hours in 90 per cent of cases.
Meta's two-hour cap drops to one hour per app and the overnight block widens to 10pm through 7am if YouTube and TikTok adopt the same standard. Meta wrote in its announcement that "we urge TikTok and YouTube to join us and state attorneys general in adopting this new standard".
An independent auditor receives access to Meta's compliance work and reports to the state attorneys general directly, with the settlement also placing an injunction on false or misleading claims by the company about the safety of its products. Meta has not admitted liability, and its announcement contains no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.
Bonta said the agreement "institutes real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children on Facebook and Instagram", and that it would "make social media less dangerous for our kids". C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer, said the settlement will "empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms", and said its success depends on other platforms following.
Evidence heard before the deal
Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director, told the court that the company had consistently put profit ahead of safety. "If you step away from the product, they are not going to make any money," he said. Béjar also told the court that Meta's "Take a Break" tool is "designed to fail", because a user has to switch it on. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, testified late on 25 August in defence of the company's child safety record. Mosseri has drawn a distinction between problematic use and clinical addiction. Mark Zuckerberg was on the witness list and did not reach the stand.
Paul Schmidt, appearing for Meta on 20 August, said there is "no question that some teens struggle to manage their time with social media" and said the company takes enforcement of its age limits seriously while recognising that some users still sign up with false birthdays.
Haley Hinkle, policy counsel at Fairplay, published research in September 2025 finding that 60 per cent of the Meta teen safety features tested were either unavailable or did not work as advertised. Meta called those findings "misleading" and "dangerously speculative". Marc Berkman of the Organization for Social Media Safety said the record shows a "lack of real institutional willingness to act here".
Meta had told the court in pre-trial filings that a loss could expose it to penalties of up to $1.4 trillion.
Jay Jones, the Virginia attorney general, said Meta "intentionally deceived the public about ... addictive ... design features that have wreaked havoc on youth mental health". Bonta said the company "has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms, and will do it within months".
The New Mexico judgment of 7 August 2026
Judge Bryan Biedscheid of New Mexico's First Judicial District Court ordered Meta on 7 August 2026 to pay $942 million and to rebuild child protections on Facebook and Instagram for five years. A Santa Fe jury had returned the first part of that figure on 24 March 2026, finding 75,000 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act and imposing $375 million in civil penalties; the court added $567 million in the second phase, which ran to May 2026 and dealt with what Meta must change. The court found the platforms to be a public nuisance and rejected the company's Section 230 defence. The New Mexico Department of Justice said the ruling was the first time a court had held a social media company liable for designing products that promote addiction and expose children to sexual exploitation.
Raúl Torrez, the New Mexico attorney general, filed that case on 5 December 2023 against Meta and Zuckerberg personally, alleging failure to protect children from sexual abuse, solicitation and human trafficking, and alleging that the recommendation systems on Instagram and Facebook served accounts belonging to predators to child users. Zuckerberg was dismissed as a defendant on 30 May 2024, the same ruling that denied Meta's motion to dismiss. Torrez said on 30 April 2026, as the company resisted the state's demands mid-case, that "Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety" and that "this is not about technological capability. Meta simply refuses to place the safety of children ahead of engagement, advertising revenue, and profit."
Relief ordered in New Mexico runs for five years and covers age verification, sextortion and exploitation safeguards, blocking minors from sending nude images, ending overnight push notifications for under-18s, hidden like counts, time limits, risk disclosures, funding for a statewide education campaign, training for law enforcement and compliance reports to the court twice a year. Torrez said Meta "built products it knew would fuel addiction, deepen a youth mental health crisis, and expose children to sexual exploitation, then lied to parents".
How predators reach children through the platforms
The Stanford Internet Observatory reported in June 2023, in work published alongside a Wall Street Journal investigation, that Instagram was at that point the single most important platform for networks trading self-generated child sexual abuse material. "Instagram is currently the most important platform," the researchers wrote. Systems that infer interest from browsing behaviour and suggest related accounts were connecting buyers and sellers to each other, the researchers wrote. Similar effects appeared on other services, with Twitter additionally failing to catch images that matched known PhotoDNA hashes on public profiles.
New Mexico investigators ran decoy accounts presenting as children aged under 13 and, in an operation announced on 8 May 2024 as Operation MetaPhile, charged three men who had contacted those accounts through Facebook and Instagram. Fernando Clyde and Marlon Kellywood were each charged with child solicitation by electronic device and attempted criminal sexual penetration of a minor, both second-degree felonies; Christopher Reynolds was charged with third-degree child solicitation. Torrez said the operation "uncovered how older men seek out minors and solicit conversations that quickly turn into graphic, sexual conversations with children they know are underage".
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children logged more than 80,000 sextortion reports inside a wider online enticement category in 2025. Enticement reports reached 1.4 million that year, up 158 per cent on 2024, while child sex trafficking reports rose 323 per cent.
Malia Andrus, a Meta child safety researcher, wrote in a June 2020 email disclosed in the New Mexico case that predators were reaching "~500k victims per DAY in English markets only". She wrote that "we expect the true situation is worse". On the reach of large private groups she wrote: "Nowhere in the history of humanity could you have a secret conversation with 1000 people. I'm actually scared of the ramifications here." She separately criticised the company's age checks as frequently unable to catch false claims. Expert testimony at the New Mexico trial put other platforms' detection of previously unseen abuse material at more than 99 per cent, with Meta's rate below that. The same testimony described Meta's tips to the CyberTipline as often lacking the detail law enforcement needs to act on them.
Trafficking recruitment and the domestic worker trade
Facebook was the recruitment venue in 59 per cent of active federal sex trafficking cases in 2020 where online recruitment was identified, according to the Human Trafficking Institute's annual report, drawn from 602 identified victims whose recruitment method was known. For identified child victims recruited on social media, the figure was 65 per cent, with Instagram and Snapchat next. Victor Boutros, the institute's chief executive, said the internet "has become the dominant tool that traffickers use to recruit victims" and that "Facebook overwhelmingly is used by traffickers".
Instagram profiles advertising domestic workers for sale were flagged internally at Facebook in March 2018 and left up, because, in the wording of an internal document later disclosed, "our policies did not acknowledge the violation". The company expanded its human exploitation policy to prohibit domestic servitude content on 29 May 2019. Apple threatened in October 2019 to remove Facebook and Instagram from the App Store over the trade, after the BBC prepared an investigation into an online marketplace for domestic workers running partly on Instagram. An internal Facebook document written at the time said removal would carry "severe consequences to the business, including depriving millions of users of access". Facebook removed 703 Instagram profiles in response to the BBC's approach, formed a crisis team and took down more than 130,000 pieces of Arabic-language domestic servitude content in a week, while acknowledging internally that other such content remained. An internal report in February 2021 found the company still had no reliable proactive detection for this material in Tagalog, with the Philippines among the largest source countries for trafficked domestic workers.
What the internal record shows Meta knew
Asked in an internal exchange disclosed in the New Mexico complaint what the company was doing to stop child grooming, a Meta employee wrote: "Somewhere between zero and negligible. Child safety is an explicit non-goal this half." Another employee, discussing an Apple executive whose child had been solicited on Facebook, wrote that "this is the kind of thing that pisses Apple off to the extent of threatening to remove us from the App store".
Meta's own 2021 internal estimate, unsealed in January 2024, put the number of children subjected to sexual harassment on Facebook and Instagram at about 100,000 per day, including receipt of explicit images.
Monika Bickert, Meta's head of content policy, wrote in March 2019 that plans to encrypt messaging were "so irresponsible", warning that the company would lose the ability to find terror planning and child exploitation to refer to law enforcement. Internal documents disclosed in the New Mexico case put the volume at risk at roughly 7.5 million child sexual abuse reports a year on Messenger. When end-to-end encryption was announced in December 2023, an employee wrote: "There goes our CSER numbers next year," describing the move as putting "a big rug down to cover the rocks".
Reports to the CyberTipline fell from 36.2 million in 2023 to 20.5 million in 2024, a drop of 43 per cent and the largest single-year fall the centre has recorded, which the centre has attributed in substantial part to Meta's encryption of Messenger. Total reports came to 21.3 million in 2025, with five providers accounting for more than three quarters of them. Meta has said it can review and act on encrypted messages when they are reported by a user for child safety reasons.
Meta said the New Mexico complaint "mischaracterizes our work using selective quotes and cherry-picked documents", pointed to more than 500,000 accounts disabled in a single month for safety violations and to more than 30 teen safety tools, and called the trial disclosures "sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting". Zuckerberg told the Senate Judiciary Committee on 31 January 2024, turning to parents seated behind him, "I'm sorry for everything you have all gone through."
Regulators outside the United States
The European Commission issued preliminary findings on 29 April 2026 that Meta breaches the Digital Services Act on protection of minors, citing sign-up processes that accept an unverified date of birth, limited detection and removal of accounts belonging to under-13s and reporting tools that are hard to reach and inconsistently followed up. The Commission estimated that 10 to 12 per cent of EU children under 13 use the platforms, and said Meta's own risk assessment understates the problem. Confirmation of the findings would expose the company to fines of up to 6 per cent of worldwide annual turnover. Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice-president responsible, said the act "requires platforms to enforce their own rules: terms and conditions should not be mere written statements". Meta disagreed with the findings and said age verification is an industry-wide problem requiring an industry-wide solution. The Commission reached similar preliminary findings against TikTok in February 2026 on addictive design.
Remaining litigation
MDL 3047, the consolidated proceeding in the same Northern District of California court, held 3,137 federal cases as of August 2026, with ByteDance, Google and Snap still defending alongside Meta. Roughly 800 school districts are seeking recovery for counselling costs and classroom disruption; the first federal school district bellwether, brought by Breathitt County in Kentucky, settled in May 2026 for a reported $27 million across all defendants, and the next school district trials are set for February 2027. Bellwether trials in the California state court proceeding, JCCP 5255, are scheduled for late October 2026, with Meta, YouTube and Snap facing juries after TikTok settled three further cases in early August.
