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New Mexico Attorney General Ra\u00fal Torrez, whose office won the first jury verdict against Meta over child safety anywhere in the country, told Fortune<\/em> the settlement Meta struck this week with 51 other attorneys general doesn\u2019t go as far as what his state already secured on its own.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had hoped a nationwide settlement might echo the full strength of the protections New Mexico secured in court\u2014including a direct ban on romantic and sexualized AI chatbot interactions with minors and stronger safeguards against adults targeting kids in private messages,\u201d Torrez told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cBut this settlement still represents real progress and adds momentum to finish the job of protecting kids online.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s a notable crack in what has otherwise been a unified front. Torrez is uniquely positioned to make the comparison, since New Mexico is the one place where a court, rather than a settlement, has already decided what Meta owes children.<\/p>\n Torrez\u2019s office won a jury verdict against Meta in March, when a Santa Fe jury found the company liable for 75,000 violations of the state\u2019s consumer protection law and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties. A judge added another $567 million in August after ruling that Meta had created a \u201cpublic nuisance\u201d similar to air pollution, bringing New Mexico\u2019s own tally against the company to roughly $942 million.<\/p>\n Torrez still called this week\u2019s deal historic. \u201cNew Mexico was the first state to take Meta to trial over the harm its platforms cause children, and we\u2019re encouraged to see that fight now translate into a nationwide settlement,\u201d Torrez said. \u201cThis is a testament to the attorneys general across the country, from both parties, who came together and refused to let this company off the hook.\u201d<\/p>\n Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion over the next decade and overhaul how Facebook and Instagram work for anyone under 18, settling the lawsuit brought by the 51-state coalition that accused the company of designing its platforms to be addictive to children. The deal, still subject to court approval, requires a default two-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block between midnight and 6 a.m., muted notifications during the school day, hidden like counts, a ban on cosmetic-surgery and extreme makeup filters, stronger age verification, and an independent auditor to check Meta\u2019s compliance for five years. California Attorney General Rob Bonta\u2019s office, which led the case, has not yet responded to\u00a0Fortune<\/em>\u2018s\u00a0request for comment beyond its public statements. TikTok and YouTube also did not respond to requests for comment, despite Meta publicly calling on both companies to adopt the same restrictions in an open letter posted the same day as the settlement.<\/p>\n In a statement to Fortune, <\/em>Meta\u2019s Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said they were calling on TikTok and YouTube to make the same commitments.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m pleased to announce that Meta has reached an agreement with a bipartisan group of state attorneys general from around the country on a new set of rules governing teens\u2019 use of social media,\u201d Mahoney said. \u201cBecause teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution. We therefore call on our industry peers, TikTok and YouTube, to implement this new framework, right away. As a parent, I\u2019m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement. But its success depends on all other social media platforms following Meta\u2019s lead.\u201d<\/p>\n The child advocacy group Fairplay, in a statement to Fortune, <\/em>called the deal \u201ca watershed moment for the growing movement to protect children from addictive and dangerously designed social media,\u201d pointing to sleep protections like the nighttime block as \u201cthe most significant injunctive relief yet from Meta.\u201d But its statement quickly turned to the same kind of gap Torrez flagged. \u201cWe are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes,\u201d the group said. <\/p>\n \u201cIn general, the settlement is too focused on offering parents tools rather than restricting harmful features. It also relies a lot on nudging users toward breaks, and we are skeptical that that will be effective. And even the financial penalties\u2014while the biggest Meta has ever faced\u2014are not large enough to fundamentally change Meta\u2019s relentless targeting of youth.\u201d<\/p>\n Fairplay tied its critique directly to a specific ask: a floor vote on the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which has stalled in Congress for years despite what the group says is support from more than three-quarters of the U.S. Senate. \u201cAs internal documents have shown over and over, Meta and other social media companies deliberately design their products to addict kids, and that is the root cause of so many mental health difficulties and serious online harms for minors.\u201d<\/p>\n The Center for Democracy and Technology said fixing one problem creates another. \u201cMeta has agreed to implement several changes across its platforms as part of its settlement with 52 state attorneys general,\u201d said Kate Ruane, the group\u2019s director of the Free Expression Project, in a statement. \u201cAs part of that agreement, Meta is providing tools to help families make their own decisions about kids\u2019 online experience and screen time\u2014giving kids and their parents more choices and control is beneficial. But we also see the potential for significant risks to everyone\u2019s privacy and free expression rights online, especially in the ways this settlement will subject all users to invasive age assurance and limit all kids\u2019 access to content and services regardless of their individual needs. We will continue to review the settlement, and will be monitoring its implementation closely.\u201d<\/p>\n Wanting stronger age checks and worrying about what those checks require of everyone else has defined the broader fight over kids and social media this year, as platforms turn to facial scans, ID uploads, and other biometric tools to figure out who is a minor. Most Americans don\u2019t trust that any of it will actually work, and reporting shows kids find ways around the checks that do exist, including drawing on facial hair to fool age-estimation software. The same trade-off is playing out abroad: Australia, the U.K., and France have all moved toward under-16 social media bans this year, and each has run into the same problem Ruane is describing: verifying a child\u2019s age tends to mean verifying everyone\u2019s.<\/p>\n Phillip Yannella, co-chair of the privacy, security, and data protection practice at Blank Rome, told Fortune<\/em> the settlement\u2019s significance may be less about what Meta agreed to than about what it signals for Washington. \u201cCongress, which hasn\u2019t done a thing on privacy in forever, the one issue that they do care about is children\u2019s safety, and it does appear like KOSA is moving forward.\u201d He was, however, more cautious than the advocacy groups and Torrez about calling Meta\u2019s concessions inadequate. <\/p>\n \u201cChildren\u2019s safety advocates and plaintiffs\u2019 lawyers are going to take a maximalist view of children\u2019s safety, and I would imagine they would suggest there\u2019s much, much more that could be done,\u201d he said. \u201cBut this is a settlement, and sometimes you don\u2019t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good. These are steps in the right direction if you\u2019re looking at it from a children\u2019s safety perspective that weren\u2019t there yesterday.\u201d Still, he said the settlement could mark a turning point beyond Meta alone: \u201cYou could look at this and say this is really the first domino to fall, and there\u2019s going to be a lot more changes in this environment, not just for Meta, but for all of them: TikTok and everyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n Julie Scelfo, founder of Mothers Against Media Addiction, told Fortune<\/em> the settlement was \u201cgreat news to wake up to\u201d but stopped well short of calling it enough. \u201cWhile the amount of this settlement is significant and historic, it doesn\u2019t come anywhere close to accounting the full scale of harms that Meta has wrought,\u201d Scelfo said. \u201cThere is no number in the world that can make up to the loss of children to American families, which we can\u2019t even calculate, because there are so many kids that were shown harmful messages or led down a destructive path, but because it happened privately on their own screen, even family members and doctors may not know the original source.\u201d<\/p>\n Scelfo pointed to the settlement, which is worth roughly 1% of Meta\u2019s market capitalization. \u201cI was frankly disappointed to see this number,\u201d she said. \u201cIf you look at the size of the tobacco settlement and the number of people that were harmed there, and you compare it to this, you can see that this number is inadequate.\u201d<\/p>\n She was also skeptical that Meta\u2019s public call for TikTok and YouTube to adopt matching rules amounts to genuine industry leadership. \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating, right? Again, this is all about market share and about trying to minimize the pain to their bottom line,\u201d Scelfo said. Asked whether other platforms, including gaming companies, will make similar changes on their own, she pointed to a pattern she said goes back decades. \u201cHistory has shown us that these companies will stop at nothing to maximize profits, and the only thing that stops them is adequate regulation and enforcement,\u201d she said, comparing it to Upton Sinclair\u2019s meatpacking expos\u00e9s and, later, the advertising standards that emerged only after parents objected to sugary cereal ads aimed at kids. \u201cLaws always lag behind the arrival of new types of dangerous products.\u201d<\/p>\n That lag is the same one Fortune has tracked for months. The FTC pulled back from social media rulemaking even as nearly one in five American kids spend more than four hours a day online. Congress advanced KOSA and the App Store Accountability Act out of committee in March, only for both to stall again. More than 200 child advocacy groups and researchers wrote to YouTube in April demanding it curb AI-generated \u201cslop\u201d content flooding YouTube Kids. The same month, Meta threatened to pull its apps out of New Mexico entirely rather than comply with the state court order that Torrez\u2019s office won. In May, child advocacy groups Fairplay and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation asked the FTC to investigate Roblox over similar allegations. And days before the Oakland trial began this month, Torrez was already drafting new state legislation to extend child safety protections to AI chatbots \u2014 the same category of harm he now says the national settlement fails to cover.<\/p>\n Torrez, like Fairplay and Scelfo, ended in the same place: with Congress. \u201cA bipartisan coalition of attorneys general just proved that protecting children online is not a partisan question; it is a moral one, and that even a company with Meta\u2019s resources can be made to change,\u201d he told Fortune. \u201cCongress has watched states do this work one courtroom at a time for long enough. Parents and families are done waiting, and they should not have to keep outmatching the tech industry\u2019s lobbyists state by state to keep their kids safe. Congress has the power to finish what these settlements started and make these protections the law of the land for every child in America.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nChild online safety experts agree<\/h2>\n
Keeping kids safe online without imposing on privacy<\/h2>\n