Illinois will use its share of a multibillion-dollar legal settlement with Meta to help fix the problems the company’s social media platforms caused for children, state Attorney General Kwame Raoul told the Tribune, arguing that calls for specific spending were “premature” after a prominent teachers union pushed for the money to fill in education funding gaps.
In what Raoul has called a “monumental victory for online safety,” Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger safety measures for kids on its two top social media platforms — Facebook and Instagram. Illinois’ share of the settlement is up to about $768 million, ending a case targeting the role Meta’s platforms played in undermining kids’ mental health.
The majority of the money will go toward addressing youth mental health problems, social media overuse and other harms the dozens of states, Washington, D.C., and several U.S. territories said Meta caused, according to the Illinois attorney general’s office. That could include funding for suicide hotlines, training for medical providers on social media use and body dysmorphia, or programming that promotes youth mental health, the office said.
Raoul’s comments were, in part, a response to a statement on Wednesday from the Illinois Federation of Teachers that urged the money be used to fund schools across the state. The IFT and Chicago Teachers Union have been fighting for greater state funding for schools statewide, including $150 million that Chicago Public Schools board members recently budgeted, which exceeds what state lawmakers allocated in Illinois’ annual spending plan.
“People hear of money and they want to spend it real fast, but one of the things I need to make and want to make clear to all who are sort of salivating is that we were very intentional,” Raoul said in an interview Thursday. “It’ll be restricted towards abating the problem caused by social media addiction and other harms caused by social media.”
According to the settlement, the money to states could be used for a wide range of programs to promote youth mental health, including after-school programs, “outdoor activities,” phone-free zones in schools, related litigation efforts, or grants to schools or local governments that accomplish the settlement’s goal of remediation for kids.
Asked about the specific mental health uses laid out by the settlement agreement and the attorney general, an IFT spokesperson doubled down, arguing that better public schools would be the best way to remediate harm done to Illinois children.
“The Governor (JB Pritzker) has said he supports more funding for education but didn’t know where it would come from. The settlement with Meta just made that answer even easier,” IFT and CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said in a statement.
But in comments on Thursday, Pritzker seemed more aligned with Raoul than Davis Gates, whom he’s sparred with, as the governor was skeptical of handing over the newfound Meta money to broadly help fund education.
While speaking in Springfield, the governor said using the Meta settlement money for education could amount to “using all of this one-time money for an ongoing need,” according to a video posted by a Capitol News Illinois reporter. “The question is: How do we fill the ongoing need? And that’s what I would like to focus on,” rather than spending the one-time funding from the settlement, he said.
The Illinois settlement is part of the broader nationwide deal Meta reached to resolve claims that the company built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to kids and misled the public about the risks. The settlements could include some $17.6 billion in payments to dozens of states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, plus $459 million to resolve separate claims tied to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
Meta, which did not admit to wrongdoing, has agreed to a default two-hour daily time limit for teens across Facebook and Instagram combined, a nighttime “Night Mode” and restrictions during school hours, commitments set to last a decade. Part of the payout is contingent on whether YouTube and TikTok impose similar protections for children.
The first two payments from the Meta settlement will come in the next five to six months, with payments made annually for eight years after, according to the attorney general’s office. Under the terms of the deal, the payments are being made to the states and territories that sued, not individual residents of those states and territories.
The settlement stemmed from a federal trial in California, where state attorneys general had accused Meta of intentionally designing features, including an infinitely scrolling feed, algorithmic recommendations and frequent notifications, to hook kids and teens. The attorneys general also accused the social media giant of misleading the public about the risks its platforms posed to young people.
The Illinois attorney general’s office is specifically looking to avoid repeating how states spent funds from the tobacco settlement in the 1990s, when much of the money went to helping shore up state budgets rather than directly to prevent tobacco use. In 2000, Illinois used part of its $9.1 billion share of the funds for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks, some mailed directly to taxpayers shortly before the November 2000 election.
The Meta settlement plan echoes the intentions of Illinois’ opioid remediation fund, which seeks to use the majority of the state’s more than $1 billion share of payouts from a settlement with prescription painkiller businesses to directly mitigate harms from the opioid crisis.
It would be premature to say whether the money from the Meta settlement could eventually be allocated through a similar process, Raoul said Thursday.
And while “this is a big fish,” Raoul’s office is also engaged in litigation with other social media platforms, he noted.
“We’re not done,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed.
