Mississippi is set to receive hundreds of millions of dollars from a major multi-state settlement with global tech conglomerate Meta.
A litany of states’ attorneys general sued Meta over allegations that the technology company’s social media platforms Instagram and Facebook featured addictive designs that affected the mental health of children. Meta has since committed to pay a minimum of $12.1 billion and make changes to those platforms to resolve the lawsuits.
An additional $5 billion will be added if TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat join in. That would make the total settlement figure $17.1 billion. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced Wednesday that Mississippi will get $188,977,258 over 10 years, or $270,426,814.55 over 10 years if the other platforms agree to comparable changes.
“Big Tech has been conducting a social experiment on our children’s developing brains by making platforms that were purposefully addictive and preyed on children’s greatest vulnerabilities,” Fitch said. “A generation of children have suffered, but with this settlement we spark transformational changes to protect children from harm. Meta is setting a new standard here for the way children engage with social media, and we will seek to hold other platforms accountable to it.”
Instagram and Facebook, per the settlement, are required to implement the following safety protocols:
- Hard cap daily time limits and “productive pauses” for children, 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.
- “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. and disabling nighttime notifications from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m.
- Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. from August 15 to June 15 each 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 children and teens.
- Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states.
If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, Meta has agreed to drop the daily time limit to 60 minutes and the nighttime block will extend to 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. for youth accessing the platforms.
The agreement resolves claims by 47 states and Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands that the company designed social platforms 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. Mississippi first sued Meta in 2023.
