Attorney General Lynn Fitch issued the following statement.
Today, Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced a landmark $17.1-billion multistate settlement with Meta Platforms, Inc.—one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s and the biggest with Big Tech. Mississippi will get $188,977,258 over 10 years, or $270,426,814.55 over 10 years if other platforms agree to comparable changes. More importantly, the settlement requires groundbreaking changes to Facebook and Instagram to fundamentally change the way children engage online and protect them from the harms to their mental wellbeing and physical safety. “Big Tech has been conducting a social experiment on our children’s developing brains by making platforms that were purposefully addictive and preyed on children’s greatest vulnerabilities,” said Attorney General Lynn Fitch. “A generation of children have suffered, but with this settlement we spark transformational changes to protect children from harm. Meta is setting a new standard here for the way children engage with social media, and we will seek to hold other platforms accountable to it.” The settlement requires Meta to implement a series of safety features on Instagram and Facebook, including: ● Hard cap daily time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for its two platforms, Instagram and Facebook, a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling. ● “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. and disabling nighttime notifications from 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. ● Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. from August 15 to June 15 each year. ● Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users. ● Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm. ● Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls. ● Limits on social comparison features, including beauty filters and visible “like” counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in children and teens. ● Both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states. These are groundbreaking changes to Instagram and Facebook and more significant and comprehensive than previously ordered by any court. And perhaps most importantly, this settlement represents a down payment toward an industry-wide social media experience that allows kids to connect in a healthy way. If platforms like Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, Meta agrees to drop the daily time limit to 60 minutes and the nighttime block will extend to 10:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. The agreement resolves claims by 47 States and D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands that the company designed Instagram with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, among other things. Beginning in 2021, nearly every attorney general in the country cooperated to investigate the social media industry for designing and promoting platforms to children and teens despite known harms. A bipartisan, nationwide investigation found that Meta designed Instagram’s features to addict children while internally documenting the resulting mental health harms and failing to warn parents. On October 24, 2023, Attorney General Fitch filed a lawsuit against Meta and, on the same day, seven other states filed parallel state complaints and 34 Attorneys General filed two federal complaints. This settlement resolves those cases and claims by the other settling states and territories. On October 8, 2024, Attorney General Fitch filed a similar suit against TikTok. That action and other investigations continue. In addition to Attorney General Fitch, the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming joined the settlement.Kingfish note: So will the age verification clause require digital ID?
8 comments:
Where's my check?!? haha
So Meta gets ro keep the majority of the ill-gotten profits, and continue to operate their manipulative surveillance platform. Big win for Zuck!
Just another Fitch special - joining ongoing cases brought by competent AGs in other states and then crowing like SHE actually did something. Remember when Republicans screeched about the need for tort reform, caps on monetary damages, and slandered the plaintiffs' bar? My, how the holier-than-thou have fallen.
Lots of campaign funds!
I am extremely unhappy that the government is now dictating how my child can interact with social media. I realize that many parents don't properly monitor their children and so forth, but it isn't the government's place to do that either. It is a very slippery slope.
Court ordered bribes rock.
I think it's a good start to a severe problem with communications around the world. But if you think that a projected 27.4 million a year for ten years is big money remember in 2025 the state budget was 7 BILLION/year. That money is about 0.3-.4% of the budget; in addition who gets this money? Better than a swift kick in the butt, I guess.
Meta must have been getting crushed in the Oakland trial, to settle for $17 billion before the plaintiffs even rested their case.
It's too bad the public won't get to see the evidence now, so the whole story could be told about social media addiction in kids.
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