Minnesota Gets $214M in Meta Settlement Over Kids’ Safety

(KNSI) – Minnesota will receive at least $214 million, and possibly as much as $307 million, under a national settlement with Meta Platforms announced Wednesday by Attorney General Keith Ellison.

The agreement is worth up to $17.1 billion nationwide, which Ellison’s office says makes it the largest Big Tech settlement on record. Meta will pay the participating states a minimum of $12.2 billion. The rest depends on whether other social media companies, including TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, sign on to similar terms later.

Minnesota’s share could grow by another $8.5 million. The deal also settles state claims over Meta’s sharing of private Facebook user data with outside firms such as Cambridge Analytica ahead of the 2016 election.

Money aside, the settlement forces changes to how Instagram and Facebook work for users ages 13 to 17. Meta will have to cap combined daily use of the two apps at two hours, with mandatory breaks after 15 minutes of continuous scrolling and again at 60 and 90 minutes. That limit stays in place for five years, and drops to 60 minutes per app for 10 years if the other platforms agree to match it.

Overnight access gets blocked from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m., a window that would widen to 10:00 p.m. through 7:00 a.m. if competitors follow suit. Push notifications shut off on school days from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year.

Meta must also tighten age verification, strengthen parental controls, give users more say over what the algorithm feeds them, and limit features tied to social comparison, such as beauty filters and visible like counts. The company has to do more to keep bullying and other harmful content away from young users as well. An independent auditor and the states will check both whether the changes get made and whether they actually work.

Ellison called the settlement a major win for protecting children and said the changes go further than anything a court has ordered so far. He credited Meta for being the first major platform to agree to a broad youth safety deal, and said he expects it to become a template for the rest of the industry.

Minnesota was part of a bipartisan group of attorneys general who sued Meta in 2023, accusing the company of deliberately building addictive features into Instagram, knowing it was harming young users, and misleading parents and the public about it. That case went to trial last week in federal court in California. The settlement covers 47 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, and still needs a judge’s approval.

Ellison has a separate lawsuit pending against TikTok in state court, filed in August 2025, that makes similar claims about addictive design.

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