Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson (Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Jackson pledged to write the child safety terms of Georgia’s $17.1 billion Meta settlement into state law and apply them to every major social media platform if elected governor.
Jackson, the billionaire healthcare executive who upset Trump-backed Lt. Gov. Burt Jones in June’s Republican runoff, unveiled the plan alongside Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr at Liberty Plaza in Atlanta, one week after Carr announced the multistate deal with Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
The settlement resolves claims by 47 states, the District of Columbia, and three U.S. territories that Meta designed Instagram with addictive features and misled parents about harms to young users.
It requires the company to impose a combined two-hour daily limit on Facebook and Instagram for minors, block overnight access from midnight to 6 a.m., silence notifications during school hours on weekdays, tighten age verification, and expand parental controls.
Georgia’s share is expected to total nearly $100 million and could reach almost $135 million.
In a statement, Jackson said Carr had “just forced the largest social media company on earth to change how it treats kids,” and vowed that, as governor, he would make those terms “the price of doing business in Georgia for every platform.”
He linked the online safety issue to child trafficking and said Georgia’s settlement money should fund efforts to crack down on traffickers, locate missing children, and support survivors.
His plan would turn the Meta terms into statewide requirements for every major platform operating in Georgia, including age-appropriate content filtering, parental controls, limits on school-day and nighttime activity, and daily time caps.
The proposal comes as The Cook Political Report rates the governor’s race a toss-up.
Jackson faces Democrat nominee Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and Biden White House adviser, in the race to succeed term-limited Republican Gov. Brian Kemp.
Recent polls have shown Lance Bottoms with a narrow edge, with the candidates generally within single digits of each other. The two are scheduled to meet for a debate Oct. 6 in Atlanta.
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