Illinois will receive up to $768 million from a multi-state $17.1 billion settlement with social media giant Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — the culmination of a three-year legal battle brought by state attorneys general.
Nearly three dozen AGs, including Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, sued Meta in 2023 over teen social media addiction, following a two-year investigation into decisions made by company executives to encourage more engagement on its social media platforms. The lawsuits alleged engineers greenlit more addictive features like infinite scroll and autoplay despite internal company research showing the harms of compulsive social media use on teens’ brains, in addition to misleading the public about the safety of its platforms.
“This is a monumental victory for online safety that will affect an entire generation of young people,” Raoul said in a statement. “After decades of putting profits before the health and wellness of children, this landmark settlement requires Meta to put our children’s safety and mental health at the forefront.”
The settlement, announced Aug. 26, abruptly ended what was supposed to be the first of several trials spawned by the AGs’ litigation. Illinois was not one of the four states acting as plaintiffs in the federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, in which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been expected to take the witness stand.
Details of the settlement
Though the settlement still faces court approval, the $17.1 billion agreed to is one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history. Illinois will receive up to $768 million over a 10-year period, which will be used for youth mental health and online safety training programs. In similar multi-state settlements with tobacco and opioid manufacturers, Illinois has used its share of settlement funds to stand up addiction recovery programs.
But the Meta settlement goes beyond money; the company agreed to strengthen its existing age verification systems for users in addition to a host of limitations for those between 13 and 18.
Meta debuted Instagram “teen accounts” nearly two years ago, which automatically placed privacy and content restrictions on users under 16 years, in addition to gentle reminders to get off the app after 60 minutes and a default “sleep mode,” which silences notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
But Illinois’ law also goes further, requiring social media platforms to confirm a user’s age through the operating system of the device — like a smartphone — on which they are using the account. It also prohibits companies from using a minor’s data to curate the content they are served on an app, a tactic deployed by nearly all social media platforms to make scrolling their feeds more addictive.
Under the law, violators face civil penalties of up to $2,500 for each child for unintentional violations and up to $7,500 per child for intentional violations.
State Rep. Jennifer Gong-Gershowitz, D-Glenview, the lead House sponsor of the Children’s Social Media Safety Act, said this week’s settlement is “an important first step, but not the last, in holding social media companies accountable for the real-world harm that has been a feature of these platforms, not a bug.”
She noted Meta’s challenge to TikTok and YouTube baked into the settlement: Meta will hold back 30% of the settlement — about $5.3 billion — that it will pay out only if the other two platforms also pay roughly $5.3 billion each to fund youth online safety programs and implement their own limitations on teens. Those include restricted night modes, age verification measures and daily one-hour time limits. If TikTok and YouTube adopt those same time limits for teens, Meta will also halve its daily usage limit to an hour.
“Notably, even Meta now says other platforms like TikTok and YouTube should be held to the same standard — proof that these protections are necessary, not optional, and that no company should be trusted to make that call on its own,” Gong-Gershowitz told Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
