Meta has settled a lawsuit brought by attorneys general across the United States, who alleged the company deliberately designed its platforms to be addictive to children while misleading the public about it.
The deal introduces a two-hour daily time cap that parents can switch off, a night mode blocking use between midnight and 6am, and a school mode muting notifications during lessons.
Crucially, direct messages are exempt from most of these restrictions, despite being one of the primary reasons teenagers open Instagram in the first place.
The $18 billion that is more like $13 billion
The headline penalty is about $18 billion, paid out to the states in annual installments over the next decade, but only 70% of that, roughly $12.7 billion, is guaranteed.
The remaining 30% depends on TikTok and YouTube signing up to the same restrictions, which hands Meta a financial incentive to make sure its rivals never do.
Meta is now running full-page adverts in the New York Times and the Washington Post urging competitors to match its new rules, effectively rebranding a legal settlement as an act of leadership.
Given that Meta only adopted these standards after being sued by nearly every state in the country, the goodwill campaign reads more as reputational management than principle.
Filters get harder to sell
Meta has also agreed to restrict "cosmetic procedure filters", the augmented reality effects that alter a user's face beyond what makeup or surgery could achieve, while excluding fantasy filters such as turning someone into an elf.
State regulators have two months to hand Meta a letter defining exactly which filters qualify, an arrangement that raises awkward First Amendment questions about who gets to police digital appearance.
By settling rather than fighting a case that could have run for a decade and reached the Supreme Court, Meta may have avoided the worst outcome while still shaping the rules everyone else has to follow.
