Meta’s minimum payment to the states will be around $11.7 billion over 10 years. Meta agreed to pay another $5 billion ($16.7 billion overall) if TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat end up settling state claims on similar terms.
This effectively means that Meta will get a discount if its top rivals aren’t forced to impose the same restrictions on kids’ use. Meta, which still denies the states’ allegations, reported revenue of $60.8 billion and net income of $15.8 billion in Q2 2026.
Other settlement terms
Although state AGs announced the settlement amount as $17.1 billion, that includes a $459 million deal from the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport’s office said that states today “also announced the resolution of claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties like Cambridge Analytica in the run-up to the 2016 election.”
California is slated to receive the largest payment, ranging from $1.5 billion to $2.2 billion. The state legislature and governor will have control over how much of it is spent, “but in the proposed settlement it is earmarked for purposes related to the prevention or remediation of mental health or other harms to young Californians associated with social media use,” Bonta’s office said.
In addition to the requirements mentioned earlier in this article, the AG’s press release said that Meta agreed to “an enhanced mechanism for teens to report potentially harmful content and a requirement that Meta respond to 90 percent of those reports within six hours; a ban on displaying numbers of likes or reactions to users under 18; a ban on cosmetic procedure image filters for users under 18; [and] an option for users under 18 to have a non-personalized feed, meaning a feed that doesn’t use an algorithm to target them with content aimed to keep them endlessly scrolling.”
Meta must use age-verification systems to detect users under 18 and remove kids under 13, will have to “bring on an independent auditor with expansive access to information and resources,” and “be subject to an injunction prohibiting it from making further false, misleading, or deceptive statements around its safety features,” Bonta’s office said.