State Nets Millions In National Settlement With Social Media Company Meta

A national settlement with the makers of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram means not only big money for West Virginia, but changes to the sites themselves.  

Subject to court approval, the agreement resolves claims by 47 States and D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands that Meta designed Instagram with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, among other things. Only Florida, New Mexico and Texas did not join this settlement. 

Beginning in 2021, nearly every attorney general in the country cooperated to investigate the social media industry for designing and promoting platforms to children and teens despite known harms. The settlement also resolves the states’ claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, leading up to the 2016 election. 

Attorney General JB McCuskey announced Wednesday that under the settlement, West Virginia will receive more than $114 million.  

“What Meta has agreed to do is not just pay us $114 million, but to also make their platform better, more usable, and importantly safer for children,” McCuskey said in a press conference Wednesday morning. 

The changes include: 

• Hard cap daily time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for its two platforms, Instagram and Facebook, a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling. These limits remain in effect for five years. If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years. 

• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. 

• Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year. 

• Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users. 

• Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm. 

• Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls. 

• Limits on social comparison features, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in kids and teens. 

• Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states. 

McCuskey was particularly excited about the ability for parents to turn off algorithmic suggestions for children’s accounts. 

“Children will only see what it is, in a reverse basis, all of their actual friends are doing, just like Facebook used to be,” McCuskey said. “I don’t know how many people watching this had Facebook when it first came out, but it was essentially just, you were just interacting with the people that you had connected with on the platform.” 

He expressed his hope that the changes, once implemented, would spur younger users to spend more time outside and off the platforms altogether. 

“The hope here is that the extreme mental anguish, the suicide rates that are coming from these platforms, and the general overall usage of these platforms will decrease, and we will start to see our kids outside riding their bikes, interacting with each other in person, and doing all of the things that we all did as children a little bit more often,” McCuskey said. “Because we know that playing outside is a lot better than scrolling on Facebook, not just for your mental health, but for your physical health as well.” 

Governor Patrick Morrisey released a statement regarding the settlement. As West Virginia’s attorney general, he joined a coalition of attorneys general in filing a federal lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California against Meta Platforms in 2023. 

“When we first launched this bipartisan investigation and joined 32 other states in federal court, our mandate was crystal clear: protecting West Virginia’s youth from reckless corporate practices that profit off child addiction,” Morrisey said. “Meta knew the immense physical and psychological toll its platforms were taking on young people, yet chose profit over the mental health and safety of our children.” 

“Today’s historic $16.7 billion settlement is a monumental victory for families across West Virginia and the nation. It sends an unmistakable message to Big Tech that no company, no matter how powerful, is immune from consumer protection laws or accountable oversight,” Morrisey continued. “As Attorney General, I fought to ensure our kids weren’t treated as an ‘untapped’ commercial resource, and as Governor, I will continue to ensure our communities have the resources and protections needed to foster a safe, healthy environment for the next generation.”