August 28, 2026
AG Liz Murrill announced Louisiana will receive more than $180 million as part of a $17 billion multistate settlement holding Meta accountable for designing Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to kids. The funds will go toward enforcement, education and mental health treatment and research, paid out over nine years, with an initial payment of approximately $17 million. The official press release provided the following details:
The Meta settlement is the largest state consumer protection settlement in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s. In addition to the payment, Meta must implement a sweeping set of safety features designed to protect children on Instagram and Facebook. The agreement resolves claims by 47 other States that the company designed Instagram 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. This settlement is a monumental victory for the protection of America’s children and will fundamentally transform how the entire social media industry designs products for kids and teens.
The settlement requires Meta to implement safety features on Instagram and Facebook, inc:
- Cap daily time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for its two platforms, Instagram and Facebook, 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. These limits remain for five years. If Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years.
- “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
- Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year.
- Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.
- Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.
“Meta did the right thing. Now it’s time for other Big Tech and gaming companies to do the right thing as well. I’ve made the protection of our kids the priority of my administration, and I won’t stop until industry is held accountable, parents and children are informed, empowered, and protected, and those who would harm our most innocent are locked away,” AG Murrill stated.
In continuation of that same priority, legal action against Snap, Inc., and Discord was filed this morning in the 21st Judicial District of Louisiana. These companies profess that their platforms are safe environments for children to communicate, but nothing could be further from the truth. Snap and Discord are platforms that facilitate encrypted messaging and are frequently used by predators to evade detection and chat with children through games like Roblox.
LFF commends AG Liz Murrill for a task well done but reminds Louisiana families this is just the beginning, not the end, of our fight for virtual accountability.
This settlement binds only one company. Kids were not harmed by just one platform, and this problem will not be solved with just one brokered settlement. We need Congress to act.
Don’t give Meta credit for these changes. Meta didn’t volunteer to make design alterations – it was forced to after being brought to court by twenty-nine AGs – and these updates come without any apology or admission of wrongdoing.
What the settlement does NOT do:
- Provide an admission of wrongdoing
- Does not cover WhatsApp, Messenger/DMs, VR, gaming, or AI
- Does not resolve private lawsuits
- Does not last forever – all obligations expire 10 years from the effective date
- Does not constrain Meta’s future advocacy
- Does not mandate specific content removal standards beyond Meta’s own policies
- Teen content-safety duties are largely keyed to Meta’s existing Community Standards and represented current measures
What’s Next? Congress Must Make Big-Tech Accountable
The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) passed Senate committee and is advancing. KOSA has the strongest protections to date, including a real, enforceable duty of care. Protecting kids goes beyond party lines. The bill is supported by ⅔ of the Senate. Congress returns to DC in mid-September, and we need the House to finish. Our lawmakers have the power to get KOSA to Trump’s desk before November.
Read more here.