Attorney General Phil Weiser announces over $17 billion settlement with Meta over child safety claims | #childsafety | #kids | #chldern | #parents | #schoolsafey

DENVER (KKTV) – Attorney General Phil Weiser announced Wednesday that Meta Inc. will pay over $17 billion and implement child-safety reforms on Instagram and Facebook under a nationwide settlement.

Attorney General’s office officials said the agreement, which is subject to court approval, resolves claims that Meta designed Instagram with “addictive features,” knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms.

Under the settlement, officials said Colorado will receive close to $615 million over nine years, which will go directly to protecting and restoring the mental health and safety of children in Colorado.

“Today’s action is an important step forward and I welcome Meta’s decision to accept responsibility and to collaborate with the multistate coalition to protect kids who deserve better,” Weiser said in a statement.

Officials said the settlement requires Meta to implement a series of safety features on Instagram and Facebook, including the following:

• Hard cap daily time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for 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. These limits remain in effect for five years. If Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years.
• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from midnight to 6 a.m.
• Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. during the school 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 kids and teens.
• Both the implementation and effectiveness of the features will be regularly assessed by an independent auditor and the settling states.

The settlement also separately resolves the states’ claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties to garner support for political candidates leading up to the 2016 election, officials said. Colorado will receive an additional $11.4 million to settle those claims.