Arkansas benefits from recent META settlement

Published 3:05 pm Wednesday, September 9, 2026

LITTLE ROCK — On August 26, Attorney General Tim Griffin announced that he and 50 other attorneys general reached a settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, resolving litigation from a lawsuit initiated in March 2023.

Every state, with the exceptions of Texas, New Mexico and Florida, as well as several territories and the District of Columbia participated in the lawsuit. Without admitting wrongdoing, META agreed to the settlement without a trial verdict. Those three states are pursuing separate litigation against Meta.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier called the settlement “peanuts compared to the profound harm Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflict on kids. We’ll see them at trial.”

In the press release, Griffin stated “This is a proud day for Arkansas. In March 2023, two months after I took office as Attorney General, we became the first state to sue Meta for violations of a state Deceptive Trade Practices Act for misleading minors and their parents about the addictive nature of its platforms’ algorithms. For years, Meta represented that its platforms posed no risk to the mental health of young people, all while knowing that its algorithms were designed to get kids hooked and to keep them online for as long as possible, with well-documented adverse mental health consequences.”

According to the settlement document, which was approved by the court on August 27, Arkansas’ portion of the settlement will be a one-time payment of $6,130,989.89, plus a Guaranteed Installment Payment (annual) of $17,245,993.63. If certain conditions are met, additional annual Contingency Installment Payments of $7,433,055.85, with a total maximum potential of $246,790,494.82.

According to the settlement, “The amount paid shall be used for any lawful purpose consistent with the Settling State’s Attorney General’s authority.”

The installment payments will be made annually for 10 years. The total financial judgment against META is $17,139,940,771.01, with $5,024,026,007.70 only payable if both YouTube and TikTok voluntarily meet two conditions: implement a one-hour Daily Limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures; and, each pay the same contingency amount ($5,024,026,007.70). Half of META’s contingency payment is dependent on YouTube’s payment, and the other half on TikTok’s.

To put the judgment in context, $17.1 billion is 8.5% of META’s 2025 revenue. Spread over 10 years, assuming the same level of revenue, it is only 0.85%.

With the minimal financial impact noted, the more significant components of the settlement are the measures META agreed to implement. Specifically, as noted on META’s website:

• Age Assurance: Stronger technology to proactively catch accounts that may belong to under-13s, and between the ages of 13 and 17 (technologies included ID verification, facial age estimation, and age signals (such as device IDs, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses) shared by operating systems and app stores operated by Apple and Google.)
• Age-appropriate content restrictions: Maintain current content standards to interaction with age-inappropriate accounts and content. From the settlement “For the purposes of this Agreement, Age Inappropriate Content shall mean content prohibited by Meta’s Community Standards concerning bullying and harassment; nudity and sexual activity; child sexual exploitation, abuse, and nudity; sexually explicit language; suicide, self-harm and eating disorders; graphic violence and incitements to violence; gambling; and restricted substances or goods (including illegal drug use), … as well as high-risk viral challenges and risky stunts.
• Algorithmic Feed Control: Teens will be able to choose a feed that isn’t personalized by our recommendation systems as their default.
• Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay
• Disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters
• Hidden Likes: Teens won’t see the number of likes and reactions on posts by default.
• Night Mode: A default block from our apps between midnight and 6am
• Regular Prompts: Teens will receive prompts after every 15 minutes of continuous screen time and total daily usage hits 60 minutes and 90 minutes on Facebook or Instagram.
• Reporting and ongoing protection from harmful content: Improve our response times to teens’ reporting content that concerns them
• School Mode: Notifications will be muted by default between 8 AM and 3 PM. During those hours, teens will no longer receive push notifications, except for direct messages and alerts about their account security or safety.
• Strengthening our parental controls: Encourage parents to set up our supervision tools and give them new controls and insights. This includes notifying parents when a teen links a secondary account, alerting them to interactions with potentially suspicious accounts, and providing periodic updates on their teen’s usage and any changes their teen attempts to make to their protective settings.
• Time Limit: A default two-hour daily time limit that is cumulative across Facebook and Instagram, including if multiple accounts for the same user is suspected or detected
• Unwanted contact from strangers: Strengthen efforts to make it harder for potentially suspicious adults to find, follow, or interact with teens.

According to META, “direct messaging features are excluded from Night Mode, Time Limit, and School Mode restrictions, to allow teens to stay connected with friends and family.”

The settlement includes a sunset clause, “unless otherwise specified, the obligations set forth in this Agreement shall expire 10 years from the Effective Date. Upon expiration, the Parties shall have no further obligations under these Sections.” It also includes a stipulation that if industry peers adopt this new standard, certain provisions will be strengthened. The Time Limit and Night Mode features will start with a five-year commitment, but will be extended to 10 years and prompt stronger default limits — reducing the Daily Limit to one hour per app and expanding Night Mode hours to 10:00 PM–7:00 AM.

From a Facebook press release dated August 26, “We’re pleased to launch these new protections, and we’ll continue to work with parents, policymakers, and regulators around the world to further our shared goal of supporting teens and empowering parents online.”

“The agreement is designed to drive industry-wide adoption, ” it continues, “for meaningful progress to happen, we urge TikTok and YouTube to join us and state attorneys general in adopting this new standard.”

YouTube and TikTok have not published public responses, yet.

Donna Rice Hughes, president and chief executive officer of Enough Is Enough, a national nonprofit focused on online child safety, praised the agreement as a “watershed victory for children and parents”, though she argued, “kids are still not safe online.” She indicated disappointment that the settlement did not “require critical age verification technologies to keep kids under 13 years old off their platforms.” She further urged congress to pass the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the App Store Accountability Act, the Stop Child Sex Abuse Material (STOP CSAM) Act, and the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue (GUARD) Act.

Sen. Michael Bennet, Colorado Democrat, said “Now more than ever, it is clear we need a dedicated federal agency, as I have long proposed, able to set rules of the road to protect the American people and our children and prevent harm before it takes place, not after,” he said.

Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders added “We will continue to hold Big Tech accountable, and I am hopeful other social media companies will follow Meta’s lead accepting responsibility for the harm their platforms have done to kids and begin to right this wrong.”