New Delhi: In a landmark settlement, Meta Platforms has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and change how Instagram and Facebook work for teenagers in the US, ending a trial over allegations of teen social media addiction.
The deal cut short a trial that began 18 August in Oakland, with Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg due to take the stand. It means Zuckerberg would be avoiding expected testimony.
The size of the payout led the coverage, but Mishi Choudhary, technology lawyer and founder of Software Freedom Law Centre, said the money is not the heart of it. “The fine is important, but the crucial feature of the settlement is that Meta has now agreed to concrete changes to how its platforms work for children,” she told ThePrint, pointing to time limits, night-time restrictions, stronger age checks and expanded parental controls.
Meta has structured the agreement to avoid legal action against it abroad. But what it has agreed to in the US is increasingly in line with what Indian law requires.
What Meta has agreed to do
The changes are meant to take effect after court approval, most within a six-month window. Under-18 users get a default daily limit of two hours across Instagram and Facebook combined, and a night block from midnight to 6 a.m. Both can be lifted only by parents.
Notifications are switched off overnight and during school hours, defined as 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays through the school year. Teens will no longer see the number of likes or reactions on posts.
Meta will block minors from using cosmetic-surgery filters and extreme-makeup effects. Teenagers can choose a non-personalised feed, one built from accounts they follow in chronological order rather than an algorithm tuned to keep them scrolling, and their parents can lock that choice in.
The agreement also sets clear limits for age checks. Within a year, Meta’s system must wrongly identify no more than 10 percent of 16-17-year-olds and 3 percent of 13-15-year-olds as adults when it uses third-party verification tools. Its own age-checking models get more time to meet the same standards.
It must also use age information available from Apple and Google through their app stores and operating systems.
There are caps on how many times a user can retry an age check, counted across linked and secretly held accounts, and time limits that apply cumulatively across a teen’s multiple accounts.
An independent auditor, jointly chosen, will review compliance every year for five years and publish summaries. Meta is also placed under an injunction barring it from making false or misleading claims about its safety features going forward.
“Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms, and will do it within months,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said, calling the terms as real and enforceable.
Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney described the framework as one that will let parents manage how their children use the apps, and added its success “depends on all other social media platforms following Meta’s lead”.
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The money & the catch
The California Attorney General’s office estimated the payout at up to $17 billion over 10 years, with 51 attorneys general involved. Meta put the figure at about $18 billion and the number at 52. The difference is due to states such as Texas, which can join the settlement but have not signed the payment plan.
Not all of that money is unconditional. While about 70 percent is guaranteed, the remaining portion close to $5 billion is released only if Meta’s rivals fall in line. The agreement names three “core industry members” whose participation matters: Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
Meta’s public appeal named only TikTok and YouTube, but the contingent payments and the tougher default limits both hinge on all three adopting equivalent one-hour daily caps, night blocks and age checks, and on the larger companies among them accepting matching payment obligations to the states.
Until then, the two-hour limit and midnight block will remain in place. These rules will apply for five years, while the other commitments will last 10 years. Meta expects to record about $10 billion in legal costs in the third quarter of 2026.
The states were seeking far more, and the settlement came midway through a trial that featured testimony from a former Meta engineer and the company’s internal documents. For Choudhary, that record is part of what makes the outcome matter. “The disclosures are revealing and allow the public to compare what the company knew internally with what it was saying publicly about safety.”
Where India stands
India’s rules are stricter than the US. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, the federal law at the centre of the US case, protects children under 13.
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 treats everyone below 18 as a child, one of the widest definitions among the major privacy regimes and significant in a country with one of the world’s largest populations of minors.
Section 9 of the Act requires platforms to obtain verifiable parental consent before processing a minor’s personal data, and Section 9(3) bars behavioural tracking, profiling and targeted advertising directed at children regardless of consent.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) notified the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Rules in November 2025.
Rule 10 sets out what “verifiable” has to mean in practice: a platform must confirm that the user is a minor, that the person giving consent is genuinely an adult parent or guardian, and that their relationship is real, using government-recognised identity proof or virtual identity tokens rather than a self-declared tick-box.
Other Indian policies also take a similar approach. The Ministry of Education’s 2020 PRAGYATA guidelines recommend age-appropriate limits on screen time. India is also debating whether to follow Australia and set a minimum age for social media use, putting the responsibility on platforms rather than children or parents.
Taken together, India’s demands—reliable age assurance, verified parental consent, a ban on targeting children with data-driven advertising, and safer defaults—are close to the concessions Meta has now accepted in the US.
That overlap is why Choudhary expects the settlement to surface in Indian proceedings. “India is already asking questions about child safety on Meta’s platforms, so I would expect this settlement to be cited here as well.”
She argued the deal removes a defence the social media giant has used for years. “Meta has spent years telling governments that it is already doing enough to protect children online. This settlement makes that argument harder to sustain,” Choudhary said. “If Meta can introduce tighter defaults, time limits and age checks in the US, regulators in India and elsewhere will ask why children in their countries should get weaker protections.”
The pressure at home is already building. In early August, a parliamentary committee gave Meta a short window to respond over child sexual abuse material that surfaced in paid advertisements on Instagram. It raised the prospect of stripping Meta of its safe-harbour protection and treating the company as a publisher. It was not the first time the panel had summoned the company’s leadership over how its platforms handle content in India.
The settlement is drafted to block any direct legal spillover. Meta admits no wrongdoing, and the text states that the agreement sets no standard of care and no precedent in any non-participating US state “or any international jurisdiction whatsoever,” and that it cannot be used as evidence in other proceedings.
But, the clause cannot stop regulators from questioning Meta’s practices. For Choudhary, the lesson is that regulators should demand evidence instead of relying on assurances. “Meta has always had a trust problem,” she said. “Every regulator must demand independent audits, real transparency and evidence that safety tools actually work, rather than taking Meta’s assurances at face value.”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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