Judge Approves Meta Settlement That Mandates Age Checks, Teen Limits and Years of Audits

A federal judge’s approval of Meta’s social media settlement last week did more than lock in a payout of about $17 billion. It also imposed a detailed product rulebook on Facebook and Instagram: age-assurance checks for users, default limits for teens, parental-supervision tools and years of outside auditing. Those operational terms are now drawing scrutiny from privacy and civil-liberties groups, which argue the deal could expand monitoring and become a template for the broader industry.

On Aug. 26, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California entered a consent judgment resolving the multistate adolescent-addiction case against Meta. The package is worth about $17 billion, though public totals vary depending on which components are counted, and the agreement says it is for settlement purposes only and is not an admission of liability by Meta. More unusually for a tech settlement, it prescribes product design and compliance requirements that will play out over a 10-year term, with the first guaranteed payment due within 30 days of the effective date and the rest scheduled annually.

At the center is an age-assurance system for Facebook and Instagram in the settling jurisdictions. “Within one (1) year of the Effective Date, Meta will adopt an age assurance framework,” the settlement says. That framework can rely on third-party or Meta-built tools to sort users into 18 and older, ages 13 to 17 and under 13.

New users get 14 days to complete the age assessment. After that, users who have not been age-assessed must generally be treated as teens under the agreement. The settlement also sets numerical accuracy targets for the age-checking tools. For commercial methods, within one year the maximum rate for minors being wrongly treated as adults is 10% for ages 16 and 17 and 3% for ages 13 to 15. Meta’s own tools are allowed somewhat looser targets in the first year and tighter ones in the second. The agreement also requires a “clear and conspicuous” appeals process for users who say they were wrongly identified as minors, rather than setting a comparable numerical cap for adults misclassified as teens.

The deal also mandates a set of default teen restrictions across Instagram and Facebook. Teen users must face a two-hour daily cumulative limit across the two platforms. A Night Mode must block access other than messaging from midnight to 6 a.m. Push notifications must be turned off from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during school hours, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday from Aug. 15 to June 15. The settlement also requires periodic prompts, including notices every 15 minutes of continuous use and at 60 and 90 minutes.

Within four months, Meta must also offer teens a non-personalized feed option — defined as a chronological feed from friends and followed accounts — and a way to disable autoplay. Like counts must be hidden by default, and teens must be barred from “Cosmetic Procedure Filters.”

Some restrictions can be loosened through parental supervision, but the trade-off is broad visibility for the supervising parent. Under the settlement, parents can receive information about how much time a teen spends on Meta’s services, the usernames of the teen’s social connections, the usernames of people messaging the teen, repeated searches related to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders, and suspected or linked secondary accounts.

The agreement includes data-minimization language, but it also allows Meta to keep some “Retainable Data” — metadata about age-assurance methods and related information — for as long as 90 days for integrity and anti-circumvention purposes. It permits some under-13 data to be retained for model training and testing under restrictions and requires industry-standard security measures. Meta must also do more monitoring, including looking for attempts to evade age checks, reviewing detected under-13 users’ friend networks to identify other possible under-13 users, and improving “soft matching” of duplicate accounts using signals such as device IDs, phone numbers and email addresses. An independent auditor is to receive access to nonprivileged personnel, systems, raw and aggregated data, and internal documents relevant to compliance.

Those provisions are part of why critics are focusing on the settlement’s mechanics rather than just its dollar figure. In a Sept. 1 analysis, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights group, said: “Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens.” EFF argued the agreement embeds age checks and more monitoring rather than reducing data collection. The group also said some of the content categories the settlement treats as age-inappropriate have previously swept in posts about abortion medication, sexuality, and sexual or reproductive health.

Roughly $5 billion of the package is contingent on “Industry-Wide Adoption” by Snap, TikTok and YouTube of substantially similar measures and specified payment and audit conditions, giving the agreement significance beyond Meta alone. Meta cast that structure as a selling point. “The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a company post. “Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us.”

A bipartisan coalition of state and territorial attorneys general originally sued Meta in October 2023 over product-design choices they said increased teen engagement and harms. A federal bellwether trial in Oakland was underway last month before the Aug. 26 settlement ended that phase of the case. It was not a single nationwide deal with every state: New Mexico had already won a separate final judgment earlier in August, and Texas announced its own separate settlement.