Meta Imposes Two-Hour Social Media Limit on Teens, but Can It Stop AI Age Manipulation and VPN Workarounds?

Meta Agrees to $18 Billion Settlement and Service Overhaul in Teen Addiction Lawsuit
US Joins Australia, UK and EU in Directly Restricting Platform Operations
Generative AI and VPN Workarounds Cast Doubt on Whether Regulations Will Actually Reduce Usage

Meta has agreed to an $18 billion settlement and sweeping service reforms to resolve litigation brought by 48 US states and other jurisdictions alleging that the company fueled social media addiction among teenagers. With Australia, the UK and the European Union moving to restrict teen accounts and regulate platform design, the agreement marks the emergence of direct constraints on platform operations in the US as well. However, as methods of circumventing restrictions through generative artificial intelligence and virtual private networks become increasingly sophisticated, it remains unclear whether the regulations will lead to an actual decline in social media use among teenagers.

Settlement with 48 US States in Teen Addiction Lawsuit

According to The Wall Street Journal and other media outlets on August 27, local time, Meta agreed the previous day to an $18 billion settlement with the attorneys general of 48 US states. The agreement must receive court approval before taking effect. Under the settlement filed with the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Meta will initially pay $12.19 billion in annual installments over 10 years, allocated among the signatory states in proportion to their populations. California, which led the litigation, is set to receive the largest state-level settlement of between $1.5 billion and $2.2 billion, followed by New York with between $800 million and $1.1 billion. The agreement covers 48 US states, Washington, D.C., and three US territories—Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. New Mexico, which prevailed in a separate but similar lawsuit earlier this year, and Florida, which rejected the settlement, were excluded.

The agreement does not require Meta to unconditionally pay the entire $18 billion. If competing platforms, including Alphabet’s YouTube and TikTok, accept restrictions on their operating practices equivalent to those imposed on Meta and agree to make settlement payments, the amount paid to state governments will rise to $17.1 billion. Including settlements in other privacy-related lawsuits and attorneys’ fees, the total package will reach $18 billion. That is comparable to the $18.7 billion settlement reached to restore environmental damage caused by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Two-Hour Daily Limit and Overnight Lockout for Users Under 18

As part of the settlement, Meta agreed to comprehensively overhaul the user experience for teenagers under 18. Platform use by users under 18 will be limited to two hours per day, with access blocked from midnight to 6 a.m. Notifications will also be restricted during school hours. These restrictions may be lifted only with parental approval. Teenagers will be able to choose a chronological content feed instead of an algorithmically curated one, and parents will be able to designate it as the default setting.

During the school term, “school mode” will be activated from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, disabling all notifications except direct messages. In particular, teen accounts will be given the option of a “non-personalized feed” that excludes algorithms continuously recommending content through AI and instead displays posts from followed accounts in chronological order. Teen users will be unable to see the number of reactions, including “likes,” on their own or other users’ posts, and will be barred from using photo filters that simulate cosmetic surgery or makeup. Teen accounts will be private by default, and measures will be introduced to prevent unfamiliar adults from finding or contacting teenagers.

Table 1. Meta’s Protective Measures for Accounts Held by Users Under 18

Settlement Reached One Week into Trial Amid Simultaneous Pressure for Penalties and Design Changes

The case originated in a lawsuit filed by 29 US states alleging that Meta knowingly used infinite scrolling, notifications and recommendation algorithms to increase engagement despite being aware of the risks posed to teenagers’ mental health. The attorneys general of the 29 states argued that Meta had violated consumer protection laws and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA. Meta denied allegations that it had deliberately sought to addict teenagers, but reached a settlement with the states approximately one week after the trial began. The decision appears intended to reduce the risk of astronomical damages and additional litigation while encouraging the adoption of identical teen-protection standards by rival platforms.

The 29 states sought not only substantial penalties but also a court order requiring Meta to change how its services operate. State authorities treated each of the tens of millions of teen users covered by the relevant statutes as a separate violation and calculated civil penalties and disgorgement by multiplying that figure by the maximum sanction permitted under each state’s consumer protection law. The resulting claims swelled to as much as $1.4 trillion. Meta countered that the same users had been counted multiple times under different statutes and that there had been no individual determination of whether they were actually exposed to the features at issue, arguing that the calculation was excessive. The amount sought by the states was roughly equivalent to Meta’s market capitalization at the time and approximately seven times the $206 billion settlement previously borne by US tobacco companies.

Wave of Lawsuits Targeting “Addictive Design” Spreads Across Big Tech

Experts believe the implications of the settlement are likely to reverberate across the social media industry. Platform companies have historically avoided legal liability by arguing that users, rather than the platforms themselves, posted harmful content. This lawsuit, however, achieved results by advancing the argument that the platforms’ underlying design—not their content—caused harm to teenagers. Meta’s acceptance of design changes is expected to influence other lawsuits built on the same legal rationale.

Approximately 3,000 individual damages lawsuits and another 1,300 cases brought by school districts are currently pending in the US against Meta, Google, TikTok, Snap and other companies. In March, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million in damages to a woman in her 20s who had used Instagram and YouTube for more than a decade. New Mexico secured a separate $1 billion judgment and was therefore excluded from the latest settlement.

The conditional payment structure also targets Meta’s competitors. Meta’s payment will increase only if YouTube, TikTok and Snap—which some states have identified as another platform that should be covered—adopt the same protections. If they participate, the daily usage limit for teen accounts will be reduced from two hours to one hour, while the overnight lockout will be extended from midnight–6 a.m. to 10 p.m.–7 a.m. Meta Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newstead said, “This settlement charts the direction in which the entire industry should move,” adding, “We hope TikTok and YouTube will adopt the same framework.”

Australia Blocks Accounts, UK Regulates Design as Teen Social Media Rules Tighten

The industrywide standards proposed by Meta align with a global regulatory trend already under way. Even before the US settlement, governments around the world had been developing regulations that apply uniform standards to major platforms. Australia was the first to institutionalize this approach. Since December 10 last year, the Australian government has prohibited users under 16 from creating or maintaining accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, X and other platforms. No exception is granted even with parental consent, and platforms that fail to take reasonable steps to block such accounts face civil penalties of up to approximately $39 million. By mid-December, immediately after enforcement began, 4.7 million accounts belonging to minors had been blocked or deleted, demonstrating that age verification and account removal are functioning as the regulation’s principal enforcement mechanisms.

While Australia has blocked the accounts themselves, the UK is preparing to combine age-based usage restrictions with regulation of service design. The British government plans to prohibit the provision of social media services to users under 16 while making overnight usage limits and the disabling of infinite scrolling default settings for accounts held by 16- and 17-year-olds. In addition to strengthening age verification, it will require platforms to detect attempts to circumvent restrictions through VPNs, placing enforcement responsibility on companies. With the framework being designed for implementation next spring, Meta’s US settlement is likely to increase pressure on the UK to impose stricter time limits and overnight access restrictions.

Similar initiatives are taking shape in the EU and Asia. The EU has recommended making minors’ accounts private by default and disabling autoplay, push notifications, continuous-use rewards and read receipts as standard settings. It has also proposed that recommendation systems prioritize preferences explicitly indicated by users over behavioral data. Türkiye passed legislation in April banning social media use by children under 15, while Malaysia began blocking new account registrations by users under 16 in June. The United Arab Emirates has also set a minimum usage age of 15, while Denmark and Spain are pursuing separate age-restriction legislation.

Loopholes in Teen Social Media Regulation

It remains uncertain, however, whether these regulations will translate into an actual decline in social media use among teenagers. Early results from Australia, the first country to begin enforcement, revealed a gap between account blocking and the cessation of actual usage. An eSafety Commissioner study tracking a sample of more than 4,000 children and family members found that the share of users under 16 who held accounts fell from 52.4% to 42.1%, while their actual usage rate declined by only 4.4 percentage points, from 85.9% to 81.5%. A University of Newcastle study found that 15% of 12- and 13-year-olds and 19% of 14- and 15-year-olds used fake accounts, while approximately 3% used VPNs. During the same period, the share of parents who were aware of their children’s social media use also declined, particularly among girls and children aged 10 to 12, raising the possibility that teenagers’ online activity is simply moving beyond parental oversight.

Even stronger age-verification measures could be undermined by generative AI, which may open new avenues for evasion. According to a preprint released in February, tests of eight age-estimation models using faces synthetically altered with beards, gray hair, makeup and wrinkles found that as many as 83% of images initially classified as minors were reclassified as adults. An Australian government report testing approximately 60 age-verification technologies from 48 companies acknowledged their practical applicability but also highlighted the risks of misclassification around age 16 and the unnecessary long-term retention of personal data. France’s Constitutional Council invalidated a ban on social media use by children under 15 this month because the law required all users to prove their age without specifying verification methods or privacy safeguards.

Even if technological loopholes are closed, it is difficult to classify two hours spent messaging friends as carrying the same risk as two hours of repeated exposure to recommended harmful content. After reviewing the existing research, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that there was insufficient evidence to determine that social media causes population-level changes in adolescent health. It noted that social media can provide an avenue for communication with friends and family and a source of support for teenagers who are sexual minorities or coping with illness or bereavement, while also acknowledging cases in which it promotes appearance-based comparison and displaces time otherwise spent sleeping, exercising or studying.