Meta agrees to up to $16.68 billion youth-harm settlement

Published Wednesday, August 26, 2026 · 10:19 AM EDT

Meta Platforms agreed to pay up to $16.68 billion to resolve claims by 29 states that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children, misled consumers about safety and improperly collected children's personal data, court papers show. The agreement was reached during a California federal trial and also calls for nationwide changes for teenage users, including daily usage limits and nighttime blocks. Meta denied wrongdoing. The settlement does not end thousands of other federal and state lawsuits alleging harms from social-media platform design.

Sources

In this story

Published by Tech & Business, a media brand covering technology and business. This story was sourced from usatoday.com and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.

Back to Newswire

Keep reading

Policy Products

Policy Products

TikTok and Kick say planned execution livestream would violate their policies

TikTok and Kick said livestreaming Nidal Hasan's execution would violate their policies, Axios reported, citing The Verge. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced plans to broadcast the execution, scheduled for Dec. 3. YouTube, ...

Policy Products

Policy Products

US sanctions on ICC restrict service providers, with software exemptions

The United States imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court on Friday, extending restrictions beyond individual judges and prosecutors to the institution, Outlook India reported, citing Reuters. The measures could affe...

Security Products

Security Products

Bitwarden plans commercial builds for app stores starting next release

Bitwarden says its apps distributed through stores will use commercially licensed builds starting with the next release. Current features will remain available in both the commercial and GPLv3 open-source versions, and users will ...

Products

Products

Googlebook sync updates extend support to compatible Samsung phones

Google is rolling out updates that simplify pairing Android phones with Googlebook, while some Samsung Galaxy users have confirmed that cross-device features now work, 9to5Google reports. The features include app streaming, notifi...

AI Products

AI Products

Cloudflare releases Clef-omni and cuts Clef-flash price and context

Cloudflare released Clef-omni, a decision model that accepts audio, video, images and text in one API call, with open weights available on Hugging Face. The company prices it at $0.15 per million input tokens. The model scores ch...

AI Products

AI Products

Easy Fox says AI bills exceed $1,000 a day for free Steam demo

Easy Fox says it has taken out a bank loan to keep its free Steam demo, Teach My Little Sister How To Drive, running as AI service costs exceed $1,000 per day. The developer says the number of players trying the game has grown ove...