Why is Meta, accused of failing to protect minors, settling for $17 billion?

THE ESSENTIALS

• It is a little over 16.6 billion dollars that Meta, Facebook’s parent company, agreed to pay under an agreement signed with 29 states.
• Mark Zuckerberg’s group has also made several commitments to better protect minors using its platforms.
• What will the European Commission do under these circumstances?

On 26 August 2025, Meta signed an agreement with 29 U.S. states (and other parties joined to the proceedings) committing it to pay 16.68 billion dollars (14.30 billion euros) and to comply with several commitments in favor of the protection of minors using its Instagram and Facebook platforms. Mark Zuckerberg’s company must:

• set daily usage limits of two hours for both services;
• provide for nighttime usage restrictions;
• ban notifications during school hours;
• set, by default, the absence of display of likes (particularly powerful engagement metrics);
• and prohibit “aesthetic” filters.

Why does it accept such a settlement? To understand this, one must go back a few months. Specifically, to two decisions issued on 24 and 25 March 2026.

The first, from a New Mexico jury, ordered Meta to pay 375 million dollars (322.5 million euros) for having insufficiently warned the public about the dangers of minors using its platforms, and for even having claimed that they were safe and beneficial.

However, internal documents from 2015 and testimony from former employees made it possible to prove the opposite. On August 7, in this same case, Meta was ordered to pay $567 million (€488 million).

Read more: Meta’s strategy in the face of American justice: avoid a legal defeat and regain control

A risk of contagion?

In the second case, on March 25, a federal court in California found Meta and YouTube liable for the damages caused to a 20-year-old user, who had started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9. The plaintiff alleged that these tools had driven her into addiction and had caused her severe depression with anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts (effects of social media use that are widely documented by successive general reports and scientific studies warning about the risks; see, for example in France, the latest report by Anses on the use of digital social networks and adolescent health, from December 2025). The negligent design of their services as well as the lack of risk prevention were recognized, and the victim was awarded $3 million in damages.

The platforms then feared massive "contagion." Indeed, these decisions – especially the second – were not concerned with the individual case alone but with a "multidistrict litigation" (MDL) grouping thousands of lawsuits, of which it constituted the pilot trial (bellwether trial). In addition, many other legal actions are underway across the Atlantic, at the initiative of states, families, and school districts.

Faced with the risk of multiple convictions, competing companies had moreover chosen to settle, for example ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) in a California case and Snap Inc. (Snapchat's parent company). They all feared that we would reach the turning point known to tobacco companies in 1998 when, after years of rejecting their responsibilities, four manufacturers had agreed to pay $206 billion (over a period of twenty-five years) to offset tobacco-related health costs and to limit their advertising practices (Master Settlement Agreement). That is because, above all, the decisions mentioned innovated on the substance and traced an alarming path for the platforms.

Hosts, not publishers

To understand this properly, it should be recalled that, since 1996, the Communication Decency Act and its section 230 on the "liability of interactive online services" incorporate an interpretation of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and freedom of expression that is particularly favorable to Internet actors: access services cannot be considered the authors or publishers of statements made by their users (section 230 c 1). These companies cannot be held liable for blocking and filtering certain content, provided their good faith is established (section 230 c 2). They incur "limited" liability as "hosts," unlike "publishers," who are responsible for distributing their content.

This distinction was adopted in Europe in Directive 2000/31/EC of 8 June 2000, the so-called “e-commerce” directive (Article 14), as well as in France in the Law on Confidence in the Digital Economy of 21 June 2004 (Article 6).

Meta and YouTube also repeated, in the lawsuits mentioned, that, as intermediaries of content created by others, they could not be responsible for the harmful effects observed and that far more responsible were the app stores – which would not sufficiently verify age when apps are downloaded –, the parents – who would not properly use the control tools made available to them, despite these being proven insufficient and easy to circumvent – and the minors, unable to restrain themselves…

An addictive design

But, precisely, this traditional analysis has been set aside and the assessments have shifted, from third-party content, to the design of their own services (“design liability”). It was for the addictive design of their services and interfaces that Meta and YouTube were sanctioned, a design that these companies fully control and from which they derive colossal profits, commensurate with the attention it captures, which is monetized through advertising and targeted information, and whose dangers recalled make up equally colossal negative externalities.

Admittedly, for the time being, Meta’s commitments apply only to young Americans and Europeans will not benefit from them. These promises will nonetheless serve as arguments for the application of the European Digital Services Act (DSA). Among the more than 15 investigations opened on this basis since the end of 2023 by the European Commission, many indeed concern the protection of children: on 10 October 2025, the Commission requested information from Snapchat, YouTube, Apple’s App Store and Google Play to assess their protection measures.

Sanctions that can reach 6% of global turnover

On 6 February and 26 March 2026, it published the preliminary findings of a formal investigation against TikTok and opened an investigation against Snapchat. On 10 July, it published the findings of its preliminary investigation into Facebook and Instagram. TikTok is accused of the addictive design of its services (continuous scrolling of content; repeated sending of notifications or push notifications, even at night, leading to compulsive checking of the phone; automatic and endless playback of videos, etc.) – which it must therefore change – as well as of a poor assessment of the risks to the physical and mental well-being of its users, including minors and vulnerable adults.

The European Commission accuses Snapchat of not properly verifying the age of its users, allowing under-13s to use it and under-17s to use it without being provided with a version for minors with protection against sexual solicitation practices (“grooming”) or recruitment into criminal networks. With Meta, an underestimation of the addictive risks of its features.

However, Article 28 of the Digital Services Act requires platforms to design their services in such a way as to ensure the protection of minors, while its Articles 34 and 35 impose risk assessments on very large platforms, notably regarding the design of their services; they therefore do not appear to be being complied with. This could lead to sanctions of up to 6% of each actor’s global revenue. The European Union could thus accelerate the movement and use American acknowledgments and commitments to intensify its protection of children.