HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hawaii is part of a $17.1 billion multi-state settlement with social media giant Meta Platforms that forces the company to implement sweeping child-safety measures on Facebook and Instagram.
The Hawaii Attorney General’s Office described the agreement as one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history, second only to the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.
Hawaii is one of 48 states that joined the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands in the lawsuit, claiming Meta designed the platforms with addictive features, knowingly exposed users to serious mental health harms, and intentionally misled the public.
Under the settlement which ends a federal trial that began in California last week, Hawaii will receive up to $76 million.
Safety features required in children’s accounts under the settlement include:
- Hard daily time limits (2 hours per day) and “productive pauses”
- “Nighttime blocks” restricting access from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m.
- The elimination of push notifications during school hours
- Robust age verification measures
- Safer, age-appropriate content controls
- More user-friendly parental controls
- Limits on social comparison features and beauty filters
- Regular assessments from independent auditors in settling states
“Every parent can say absolutely that their child gets around the parent controls easily,” said Attorney General Anne Lopez. “That is certainly going to be beefed up and made easier for parents.”
While forcing pauses and restricting access at night and during school may not be enough to stop social media addiction completely, “the amount of of dopamine that is released in the doom scrolling is really an impressive amount and just 15 minutes of stopping that release will help our youth sort of get back to a normalized function and will help them be more balanced,” Lopez said.
Hawaii’s $76 million settlement payment will be deposited into the AG’s litigation fund. Lopez says it will not be earmarked for a specific purpose and could be released to the general fund.
Advocates hope the money goes to education and programs that regulate AI and social media to protect youth mental health and to enforce child protection laws, including one passed last session involving AI chatbots.
“I’d like to see investments in our enforcement agencies, so with the Office of Consumer Protection and with the Attorney General’s office to really be able to not just protect our residents, our families who are affected, but try and also understand what’s available out there and see who’s complying with the laws,” said state Rep. Trish La Chica, who represents parts of Mililani, Koa Ridge, and Waipio Gentry. She is also a parent and authored legislation to regulate AI chatbots.
“It’s hard to always know how our kids are interacting with various technologies when they’re on their devices, and so I always encourage parents to just have those conversations with your kids, ask them how they’re engaging with these apps online or any of these applications,” La Chica said.
Psychotherapist Haylin Dennison has a teen child and says she’s glad to see Meta doing its part to ensure the safety of its product.
“For us to expect children with developing prefrontal cortexes to be able to have that impulse control, that is not possible for children,” she explained.
While the safety measures are helpful, advocates warn they aren’t a cure for social media addiction.
“It is also unreasonable to think that as we put time limits on the phone, that kids’ mental health will just completely improve overnight,” Dennison said. “I don’t think that social media is 100% bad. I do think that it is about time that Meta and all the other companies are taking some responsibility for their product.”
Lopez said she hopes Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube will follow Meta’s example enter into similar settlements. Hawaii is also suing TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, accusing it of using predatory tactics that harm children.
“We don’t want to just outright ban things, but we have to make sure that the regulation is in place because they’re not doing it themselves,” Lopez said.
Beginning in 2021, nearly every attorney general in the country cooperated to investigate the social media industry for designing and promoting platforms to children and teens despite known harms.
After a bipartisan, nationwide investigation found that Meta designed Instagram’s features to addict children while internally documenting the resulting mental health harms and failing to warn parents, attorneys general across the country sued Meta individually or as part of a consolidated federal lawsuit. This settlement resolves those cases and claims by the other settling states and territories.
The settlement also resolves the states’ claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, leading up to the 2016 election. Hawaii will also receive $4,685,127 for the Cambridge Analytica claim.
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