47 states and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands recently settled their $17.1 billion lawsuit against Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. Kansas’ share will be $134 million. The figure represents one of the largest consumer protection settlements in U.S. history outside of the Big Tobacco settlement three decades ago.
In a news release, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach said the issue in the lawsuit was accountability:
“This landmark $17.1 billion settlement is the largest Big Tech accountability victory in history and a monumental win for the children of Kansas and America. For too long, Meta deliberately designed Instagram and Facebook with addictive features that preyed on kids’ developing brains, exposed them to serious mental-health harms, and then misled parents about the dangers.”
The settlement dictates Meta implement a series of safety features on the two popular social media platforms:
- 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 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.
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. After a bipartisan, nationwide investigation found that Meta designed Instagram’s features to addict children while internally documenting the resulting mental health harms and failing to warn parents, 47 attorneys general sued Meta individually or as part of a consolidated federal lawsuit. This settlement resolves those cases and claims by the other settling states and territories. 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. Kansas will receive an additional $6 million for these claims, pending court approval.
Assistant Attorney General Sarah Dietz prosecuted the case for Kansas.
The Legislature must now decide how to spend the settlement to raise awareness of the addictive nature of social media.
