Meta Platforms has agreed to cap teenage users at 120 minutes a day combined across Instagram and Facebook as part of a $17.1 billion multistate settlement announced by state attorneys general on August 26, 2026. The deal, which Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office called a landmark agreement, resolves years of litigation accusing Meta of designing its platforms to maximize engagement among minors at the expense of their mental health.
The settlement grew out of a 2021 bipartisan investigation into Instagram’s effects on young users, and it produced a set of binding design changes that go well beyond a single time limit. Campbell’s office said the agreement is meant to force “meaningful, long-term changes to Meta’s products and practices,” rather than a one-time payout that leaves the platforms otherwise unchanged.
What the 120-minute cap actually restricts
Under the terms described in the Massachusetts attorney general’s announcement, users between 13 and 18 will be held to a 120-minute daily limit spanning both Instagram and Facebook combined, not 120 minutes on each app separately. Meta is also required to block teen access to both platforms overnight, from midnight to 6 a.m., and to silence notifications during two windows: 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., and again from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. to cover the school day. The settlement layers in usage-pause prompts at the 15-minute, 60-minute, and 90-minute marks, nudges intended to interrupt the kind of extended scrolling sessions the underlying lawsuits said the platforms were engineered to encourage.
Beyond time limits, Meta agreed to disable visible like counts on teen accounts, remove cosmetic-surgery filters from its camera tools, default new teen accounts to private, and bar users under 13 from Instagram and Facebook outright. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti’s parallel announcement added that the agreement also requires stronger age-assurance measures to verify how old users actually are, content controls aimed at bullying and material promoting eating disorders or self-harm, and restrictions on social-comparison features such as beauty filters that the lawsuits tied to poor mental-health outcomes among teen users. Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said in a statement covered by NPR that the changes “will empower parents to easily manage how their children access” the company’s platforms.
The $17.1 billion is split state by state
The $17.1 billion figure represents the combined multistate total, not a single lump payment to one plaintiff. Massachusetts is set to receive up to $516 million, including roughly $366 million guaranteed over ten years, according to Campbell’s office. Tennessee’s attorney general’s release put that state’s share at $751,922,691.13, directed into a newly created Children’s Digital Protection Fund, while Connecticut’s attorney general’s office said its state would receive up to $265.4 million, with at least half earmarked for youth mental-health support and phone-free school zones. Connecticut Attorney General William Tong did not soften his framing of what the money was meant to address, saying Meta “strip-mined the souls of America’s children for maximum profit with abusive and addictive features that unleashed a youth mental health catastrophe.”
The states’ releases differ on exactly how many jurisdictions joined the settlement, a reflection of how each office counts territories rather than any real dispute over participants. Massachusetts described the coalition as 48 states plus the District of Columbia and U.S. territories; Tennessee counted 47 states alongside D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands, for 51 jurisdictions; and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s analysis of the deal put the number at 52 state attorneys general. NPR’s reporting on the settlement corroborated the $17.1 billion figure and the two-hour combined cap on Instagram and Facebook as the deal’s central enforcement mechanism.
Enforcement runs for years, and comes with a catch
Tennessee’s release specified that the design-change requirements carry a five-year enforcement period, extendable to ten years if competing social platforms adopt comparable teen-safety restrictions in the meantime — a provision meant to keep Meta from arguing the rules put it at a competitive disadvantage. Independent auditors are tasked with assessing whether Meta actually implements the changes and whether they work as intended, rather than leaving compliance to Meta’s own reporting.
Not every group examining the deal calls it a clean win for teen safety. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued the settlement “embeds Meta’s active surveillance of its users” by requiring the company to build an age-estimation system that sorts every account into an 18-and-over, 13-to-17, or under-13 bracket, then collect and retain more data on teen accounts to prove compliance with the very limits meant to protect them. The digital-rights group also noted that Meta’s payment breaks down as roughly $11 billion over ten years, with an additional $5 billion contingent on rival platforms adopting similar age-restriction measures — a structure that gives state governments a financial incentive to push comparable rules onto TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat.
The settlement does not resolve every legal question hanging over Meta’s handling of young users; state and federal regulators have pursued separate inquiries into how the company handles data from minors and how its recommendation algorithms surface content to teen accounts. But for now, the binding commitment is the one multiple attorneys general put a number on: a 120-minute daily cap across Instagram and Facebook, backed by a $17.1 billion settlement and an auditor-monitored enforcement window both supporters and critics agree is built to outlast the news cycle around its announcement.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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