Erin Popolo stood outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in Oakland holding a photograph of her daughter Emily Murilla, who died at seventeen. Inside, the legal officers of 29 states had walked into U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers's courtroom to make Facebook and Instagram rewrite themselves.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta stood at the microphones with Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser and New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport. The states came for infinite scroll and the recommendation systems, and for the data Meta collected on children under 13.
The Mathematics of Compulsion
You already know the feed. The thumb never hits a last page.
The 29 states alleged that Meta knowingly designed those features to keep young people on Facebook and Instagram, and that it misled people about the safety tools it advertised. The broader bipartisan group said the company collected data from users under 13 in violation of the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. State consumer protection statutes sat next to that federal privacy claim. The statutes carry fines of as much as $20,000 per violation, and that number multiplies across millions of young accounts. By Meta's own calculations the ceiling was $1.4 trillion, close to the company's market capitalization. California lawyer Megan O'Neill put the figure closer to $193 billion at a hearing the week before openings and said Meta was pointing at the highest theoretical amount for shock value. Even that lower number sits in the same neighborhood as the $206 billion tobacco settlement in 1998.
Four offices spearheaded the trial: California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The jury in Oakland was eight people, and it was advisory. Judge Gonzalez Rogers would decide liability, the penalty, and any order to change the apps. New Mexico had already tested a public-nuisance theory in Santa Fe, the same family of claim that hit tobacco and opioids. A judge there likened Meta to a polluting factory, ordered time limits and notification cuts for young users, and hit the company for roughly $375 million in civil fines and $567 million to address harms to youths in the state. Oakland was going to test a similar argument in federal court, for more than one state at once. The week before openings, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused Meta's emergency bid to pause the trial over Section 230. Instagram head Adam Mosseri was on the witness list with Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. The trial was supposed to run about five weeks.
Meta denied the allegations. It called the attorneys general's design demands unreasonable and the money an "outlandish payout." The company said the claims were unsubstantiated and the financial demands "vastly disproportionate." It said the AGs had no proof anyone in their states was misled, and that they were trying to penalize Meta for industry-wide problems like age verification. Bonta's line before trial was simpler. "We are ready to hold Meta accountable for its role in fueling the mental health crisis of American children and look forward to trial."
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Once testimony started, the inside of the company showed up in the record. Former Meta engineering director Arturo Béjar told the court the culture was obsessed with growing the user count, and that internal studies showed young users hitting harmful experiences at much higher rates than the company told the public. On children under 13, he described a don't-ask, don't-tell ecosystem. Meta has one of the most sophisticated infrastructures in the world for spotting fake accounts. Béjar said it had no goals and no metrics for finding kids suspected to be under 13 and checking their ages.
Adam Mosseri took the stand. State lawyers put "Take a Break" in front of him, the prompt that nudges a kid to close Instagram. When the company first shipped it, almost no teens used it. After Meta launched separate teen accounts in 2024, it made the prompt a default. A teen who did not want a break could swipe the notification away. Here's the thing: the safety feature utilized a gesture the feed had already trained into the hand.
Zuckerberg was still on the list when the deal landed. He never took the stand.
A Timer Written by the Vendor
Eight days after openings, the trial ended in a consent judgment. Meta agreed to pay up to about $18 billion over ten years. CNN put just over $17 billion on the 29-state case filed in 2023, with the rest going to other states and territories. NPR wrote the penalties as up to $17 billion. The deal covers 48 states, Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories. New Mexico was already out because it had won. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier refused. He wrote that the "payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta's profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids." Judge Gonzalez Rogers approved the papers hours after they were filed. Meta admitted no wrongdoing.
The states walked in asking the court to restrict younger users and to pull infinite scroll and the recommendation systems out of the apps. What they signed is a two-hour cumulative daily cap across Meta's apps for users 13 to 17, which only a parent can lift, a prompt after every 15 minutes of continuous use, and a default night lock from midnight to 6 a.m. that a parent also has to unlock. The company will eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours, hide like and reaction counts on teens' posts by default, and block extreme makeup filters and cosmetic-surgery filters for minors. An independent auditor gets access, and a right to talk to the attorneys general. Most of it lasts ten years, and only inside the United States. Bonta said he expects the changes within months. North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson called it the largest settlement with a big tech company in history, and said a full trial would have meant years before any of this reached the apps.
Victoria Hinks stood outside the courthouse after the deal. Her daughter Alexandra "Owl" Hinks died by suicide at 16. She said she was satisfied "as long as they enforce it properly," and that it felt like something was finally done. "I feel like justice is possible."
Who Still Holds the Feed
Meta did not turn off the recommendation engine. Teens get an option to pick a chronological feed and to kill autoplay. Those are opt-ins. Josh Golin of Fairplay said the settlement leaves those recommendation systems on by default, and that the deal is built around tools for parents instead of taking the features out. Béjar called the settlement a significant milestone and then said it should not be read as an all-clear. "The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm." A two-hour cap, he said, is still two hours of whatever the feed is delivering, and the design can leave a kid craving more when the clock hits.
Thirty percent of the money, about $5.3 billion, stays parked unless YouTube and TikTok put in matching limits, including a one-hour daily cap, a nighttime block, and age checks, and pay the same amount split between them. NPR says some of those tighter defaults also wait on Snap. If the others join, Meta's two-hour teen cap drops to one hour. Meta's own blog called the deal a partnership "to set a new industry standard" and told TikTok and YouTube to follow. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said success "depends on all other social media platforms following Meta's lead." The company that designed the feed is now writing the terms its rivals are invited to copy, and holding back a slice of the check until they do.
Meta's 2025 revenue was $201 billion. Stanford's Nora Freeman Engstrom put the payment this way: not exactly pocket change, hardly a body blow. The company posted about $16 billion in net profit last quarter. Shares closed up about 1 percent the day the deal landed, after running as much as 4 percent higher. Age-check rules in the agreement are stricter than the old posture. If Meta kicks someone off for being under 13, it has to check that user's friends too. Adults can borrow some of the timers, but they cannot opt into the full teen settings.
I will take the consent judgment as it was signed. The states came to Oakland to take the feed, and Meta paid for a timer a parent has to administer, with the recommendation systems still on unless a teen opts out. Meta still decides what counts as harm. Individual families and school districts are still in court. The state cases mostly are not.
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