Meta will pay up to $17 billion over the next 10 years to settle claims from a bipartisan coalition of 51 attorneys general, including some from U.S. territories, and New Jersey is one of them. The settlement lands the same week Montclair families are adjusting to the district’s own new phone policy, so the question of what screens are doing to kids is already sitting at every kitchen table in town. This time the reckoning is coming from Meta itself.
The case, first filed in 2023 by a coalition of states, accused Meta of designing Instagram and Facebook to keep children and teens scrolling as long as possible. That meant algorithmic feeds, the systems that decide what shows up next every time a user scrolls, along with like counts and other features built to reward repeat use. States alleged Meta knew those features carried mental and physical health risks and misled parents about it anyway, while also collecting data from children under 13 without permission. That’s the behavior this settlement targets. Here’s exactly what changes.
What Changes on Instagram and Facebook for Teens
Meta admits no wrongdoing under the deal. What it agreed to is a set of default changes, meaning automatic unless a teen or parent switches them off, for every account belonging to a user under 18. The changes include:
- Automatic two-hour daily time limit
- Overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m.
- Pause on notifications during the school day.
- Hidden like counts from teen accounts by default
- Stronger age verification and parental controls
While the changes are a firmer barrier than earlier, optional reminders, determined teens have still found ways around limits like this before, and it does nothing about the recommendation systems that pull them toward more time on the app in the first place, a gap child safety advocates flagged as soon as the settlement was announced.
How Much Is New Jersey Getting From the Meta Settlement
The product changes are one half of this settlement, the other half is money. As New Jersey helped lead the case that produced it, the state’s cut runs between $525 million and $752 million, paid out over 10 years, or roughly $50 million to $75 million a year.
That $17 billion isn’t fully locked in, either. States are guaranteed roughly 70% of it (about $12.7 billion) over the decade. The remaining 30%, about $5.3 billion, only gets released if TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt comparable teen-safety limits and make matching payments of their own. Neither company has signed on to anything yet, so a meaningful slice of the number everyone is citing is conditional on competitors following Meta’s lead.
Set against Meta’s own numbers, that range shrinks fast. The company made more than $200 billion in revenue last year alone, and the full $17 billion settlement works out to about $1.7 billion a year once it’s spread across 10 years and every state involved. That’s less than one percent of Meta’s annual revenue. Set against New Jersey’s own finances, where the state has spent the past year working to close a budget gap running well past a billion dollars annually, the settlement is arguably a drop in the bucket. (This figure is separate from a related but distinct Meta settlement over data-privacy claims — worth roughly $460 million nationally, with New Jersey’s share around $20 million — which is sometimes reported alongside this one and can get conflated with it.)
New Jersey Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, whose office helped lead the multistate case, called the outcome a win for families. “As a parent, protecting your kids is always your North Star, and this agreement achieves critical protections for our children today,” she said in a statement.
Why Some Montclair Parents Say the Settlement Isn’t Enough
Jordan Goldberg is a Montclair parent of two kids in the district, a policy attorney by trade and a founding member of Screen Aware Montclair, the parent advocacy group that has spent years pushing the district on phone and tech policy. When the Montclair Pod asked her about the Meta settlement, she was careful about her lane.
“I’m not gonna claim to be an expert on the settlement,” she said. “On these various lawsuits, this one is by no means the only one. There are many, many lawsuits, and there has been culpability found in more civil suits in other states brought by parents, brought by students.”
But she didn’t hedge on the bigger pattern.
“We have seen addictive products over the course of history where companies have created a product,” she said. “Tobacco’s an easy one to look at, opioids another one, right, where they fully understood what their product was going to do to the consumers… We have an entire structure of law that deals with what happens when a company puts a product out in the world that they know is going to harm the consumer. And we don’t typically just say, nah, it’s fine, you can keep doing that.”
Her verdict on the settlement itself was measured but not dismissive. “The settlements are a step in the right direction because they make the company hurt a little bit and pay back the states that have felt the harm, but I don’t think this is the last step,” she said. “I think this is a huge win to get them to start to make changes. But I think consumers have to keep pushing and I think the states have to keep pushing.”
That pushing is not finished. The settlement covers Instagram and Facebook, with Meta publicly calling on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same limits. Florida rejected the deal entirely, with its attorney general calling the payout “peanuts” against the harm alleged and announcing they will be heading to trial, following the path states like New Mexico already took. New Mexico won that fight independently, a jury and a judge together ordered Meta to pay roughly $942 million, more than the settlement would have brought the state on its own.
Parents who want to see the new defaults for themselves don’t have to wait. Meta says the changes for under-18 accounts start rolling out this month through the Family Center, the hub inside Instagram and Facebook’s settings where parents can already see and adjust what controls are active on their kids’ accounts. And if the district’s new phone policy has you thinking about screen time beyond social media too, our full breakdown of what’s changing in Montclair classrooms this year is worth a read next.
Image credit: Pexels/Sanket Mishra
