YouTube Chief Executive Officer Neal Mohan has formally rejected Meta’s proposal for rival video platforms to join its $18 billion multistate child-safety settlement, declining Meta’s push to establish a unified cross-platform regulatory standard for teenage users. Meta negotiated the settlement framework with state attorneys general in August to resolve ongoing lawsuits alleging youth mental health harms on Facebook and Instagram, making roughly $5.3 billion of its financial payout contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting matching safety restrictions and contribution funds.
Meta’s proposed framework requires major social platforms to enforce strict adolescent safeguards, including daily usage caps, overnight access blocks, notification restrictions during school hours, enhanced age verification, and expanded parental controls. Under the conditional terms, if competing platforms agree to join, Meta’s own mandatory daily usage limits would tighten from two hours to one hour per application, while its overnight “Night Mode” restriction would lengthen by two hours, running from 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM across participating services.
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In refusing the settlement terms, Mohan highlighted YouTube’s existing standalone safety infrastructure within its Family Centre ecosystem, which allows parents with supervised accounts to customize daily Shorts feed limits—including setting them to zero—and configure customized bedtime and break reminders. The disagreement sets up potential regulatory friction, as state officials, including California Attorney General Rob Bonta, have warned that states may pursue independent litigation against non-participating platforms if they fail to voluntarily implement comparable youth protection standards.
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