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Meta has agreed to a settlement worth roughly $18 billion to end the federal trial over allegations it built Facebook and Instagram to keep kids glued to them.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: The case traces back to a 2023 lawsuit brought by 29 state attorneys general, led by California’s Rob Bonta with counterparts in Colorado, New Jersey, and Kentucky. Those four states took the case to trial in federal court in California, arguing Meta engineered the apps to keep kids coming back, fueling anxiety and depression, while publicly selling the platforms as safe. All 29 states alleged Meta violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data from kids under 13 without parental consent. The states floated a penalty number as high as $200 billion. During the trial, a former Meta data scientist testified that the team he sat on was there mostly as legal cover. George Volichenko, who worked on Instagram’s mental well-being team, said his team pushed to have the “Take a Break” feature turned on by default for the youngest teens and got shot down because “the tradeoff to core metrics was not desirable,” meaning it would cut into how much time people spend on Meta’s apps. Through all of it, Meta denied everything, saying nobody has proven its apps cause addiction and pointing to the federal law that shields platforms from what users post.

What’s going on now: In the trial’s second week, Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with 47 states, the District of Columbia, and US territories. Both sides waived all rights to appeal, and Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is expected to approve it.

The structure is unusual. The money will be paid in annual installments over 10 years to fund youth online safety initiatives. States in the deal split about $12.7 billion, or 70% of the total, across the decade. The remaining $5.3 billion is contingent on Meta’s competitors, with half tied to YouTube and half to TikTok. It unlocks only if both roll out their own daily caps for young users, real age checks, and an overnight mode, and match the payment themselves. Bonta’s office put the headline figure at $17.1 billion, which includes more than $459 million tied to the separate Cambridge Analytica claims, and said California could receive $1.5 billion to $2.1 billion. Meta expects to book roughly $10 billion in legal expenses in the third quarter.

The product changes matter as much as the money. Meta agreed to cap how long teens can sit on the apps each day, including a default two-hour limit for anyone under 18, shut things down overnight for teen accounts, tighten age checks so kids can’t get on in the first place, and build out more controls for parents and guardians.

“Today, we have secured a settlement with Meta that will make social media less dangerous for our kids and make a world of a difference for children and their families,” Bonta said. “Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm from its platforms — and will do it within months.”

The deal came right after damaging testimony from Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who took the stand Tuesday and acknowledged teen adoption of Take a Break sat at roughly 1% or 2% before Instagram flipped it on by default in September 2024, almost three years past launch. “Most teens didn’t want it,” he said. “We decided to push forward with it anyway.” He denied shielding himself from bad news, saying, “I am not trying to encourage my team to hide anything.”

Instagram product design director Francesco Fogu conceded that a slide his team prepared had numbers stripped out of it, numbers that showed teens ran into 1.5 times as much bullying, hate, nudity, and violent content as adults did. The states had also planned to call Mark Zuckerberg to the stand.