Mississippi to get $188.98 million from Meta settlement
Mississippi will receive $188,977,258 over 10 years from a multistate settlement with Meta, Attorney General Lynn Fitch announced Wednesday. Fitch said the state would receive $270,426,814.55 over 10 years if other platforms agree to comparable changes tied to the settlement.
The settlement requires Meta to pay a minimum of $12.1 billion and make changes to Instagram and Facebook to resolve lawsuits brought by state attorneys general. An additional $5 billion will be added if TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat adopt comparable terms, bringing the total to $17.1 billion, officials said.
Under the agreement, Instagram and Facebook must implement safety protocols including hard daily time caps and “productive pauses,” a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes, “nighttime blocks” restricting access from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m., and disabling nighttime notifications from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., the settlement says. The agreement also calls for limited school-time access, stronger age-assurance measures, age-appropriate content controls, enhanced parental controls and limits on social-comparison features such as visible “like” counts.
The settlement says both the implementation and efficacy of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states. If Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube adopt comparable terms, Meta agreed to reduce the daily time limit to 60 minutes and extend the nighttime block to 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. for youth accessing the platforms.
Fitch, who announced Mississippi first sued Meta in 2023, accused Big Tech of designing addictive platforms that harmed children. “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,” she said. “A generation of children have suffered, but with this settlement we spark transformational changes to protect children from harm.”
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