Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion, around €15 billion, and to overhaul how teenagers use Instagram and Facebook, in a landmark United States settlement over claims that its platforms were designed to hook children. The deal raises an obvious question on this side of the Atlantic: will the changes reach European users too?
The agreement, announced on 26th August, resolves a wave of lawsuits brought by a coalition of US state attorneys general, led by a case that 29 states filed in 2023. They accused Meta of deliberately engineering Instagram and Facebook to addict young people, of misleading the public about the risks to their mental health, and of collecting data from children under 13 without parental consent. Meta did not admit wrongdoing. Analysts have likened the settlement to the tobacco industry deals of the 1990s, which reshaped how those companies operated.
There is a catch in the headline number. Meta is guaranteed to pay around $12 billion. The remaining $5 billion only follows if TikTok and YouTube sign up to similar measures and match the sum themselves.
What Meta must change
Beyond the money, the settlement forces changes to the platforms. By default, minors’ use of Instagram and Facebook will be capped at around two hours a day, and the apps will be blocked between midnight and 6am unless a parent lifts the restriction. Notifications to under-18s will be switched off overnight, from 10pm to 7am, with further limits during school hours. The company will also hide ‘like’ and reaction counts for young users, a feature long linked to social pressure and anxiety, and tighten the age checks meant to keep younger children out. Those daily limits would fall further, to one hour, if rival platforms adopt the same rules.
“Meta must make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms,” said California’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, who led the case, adding that the changes should arrive within months.
An industry-wide bet
Meta has framed the deal as a challenge to its competitors as much as a concession. “This framework will only work if all our peers join us,” said the company’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, arguing that teenagers move across dozens of apps and that piecemeal fixes achieve little. It is also why much of the settlement is conditional on TikTok and YouTube following suit.
Will it reach Europe?
The settlement itself is American, binding Meta’s conduct towards users in the United States. But Europe has been pushing in the same direction by a different route: regulation. Under the EU’s Digital Services Act, the European Commission provisionally found in April that Meta was in breach of the law for failing to keep under-13s off Facebook and Instagram, citing weak age checks that let children simply enter a false date of birth and reporting tools that were hard to use. It is separately investigating whether the platforms’ designs fuel addiction and ‘rabbit-hole’ effects among minors, and is developing an EU-wide approach to age verification. If the findings are confirmed, Meta faces fines of up to 6 per cent of its global annual turnover.
In other words, change is coming to Europe, but through legislation rather than the American courts.
France has gone furthest. Its parliament passed a ban on under-15s using social media, only for the Constitutional Council to strike it down in August on free-expression grounds. Even so, the measure is far from dead: President Emmanuel Macron, who has made the issue a personal cause, has ordered the government to redraft the law to meet the court’s objections, and the Élysée says he wants it in force before spring 2027.
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