Meta agreed on Wednesday to a roughly $18 billion settlement with a bipartisan group of 52 attorneys general from US states, territories, and the District of Columbia.
Buried in the terms is a new feature called School Mode. Under it, push notifications from Instagram and Facebook go silent by default for under-18 accounts between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. Direct messages and account security alerts still get through, but the steady pull of likes, comments, tags, and reels alerts stops during the hours students are supposed to be in class.
What teen accounts will look like
Pending a judge's approval, these protections apply automatically to under-18 users on both apps in participating states. Most terms are locked in for 10 years.
- Time limit: a default two hours per day, counted cumulatively across Instagram and Facebook, including across multiple accounts Meta detects. A teen can only switch it off with a parent's permission.
- Night Mode: the apps are blocked from midnight to 6 a.m., meaning no feed, stories, explore, or reels.
- School Mode: notifications muted 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
- Usage prompts: nudges after every 15 minutes of continuous use, plus at 60 and 90 minutes of daily total.
- Hidden likes: teens will not see like and reaction counts on posts, their own or anyone else's, by default.
- Feed and autoplay control: teens can choose a non-algorithmic feed and turn off autoplay, and parents can set those as required defaults.
- Filters: cosmetic surgery filters were already blocked for teens, and extreme makeup filters are now blocked too.
Meta also agreed to stronger age-detection technology, expanded parental notifications, an independent research foundation with consented user data, and an outside auditor reporting annually on compliance for five years.
The limits of the limits
Three details are worth understanding.
First, School Mode mutes notifications, it does not lock the apps. A student can still open Instagram between classes, or under a desk during them. It reduces the interruptions that pull attention, which is real, but it is not a substitute for a school phone policy. States and districts are still doing that work themselves, from the ongoing fight over phone bans to Los Angeles, which is limiting screen time for more than 400,000 students.
Second, direct messages are exempt from the time limit, Night Mode, and School Mode alike, so teens can stay reachable by friends and family. That is a defensible choice, but DMs are also where a great deal of teen social activity and social pressure lives, so the exemption is a meaningful hole in the fence.
Third, and largest, the deal covers only Meta. TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat are untouched. Meta said as much in an open letter urging TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same standard, arguing that "when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another." That claim is true and also convenient: a teen capped at two hours on Instagram who spends the freed time on TikTok is a competitive problem for Meta as much as a public health one. The settlement is built around that tension. Roughly $5.3 billion of the payment is withheld unless TikTok and YouTube adopt a one-hour daily limit, Night Mode, and age assurance, and each pay a matching amount. If they sign on, Meta's own limits tighten to one hour per app and Night Mode expands to 10 p.m. through 7 a.m.
Why it is being compared to tobacco
The money is being distributed to states over 10 years for youth online safety and public health uses, including crisis intervention, after-school programs, and youth mental health programming. Meta expects to book roughly a $10 billion charge this quarter.
The comparison being drawn is to the 1998 tobacco master settlement, which reshaped an industry through state litigation rather than federal legislation. The scale is not comparable, since states collected more than $200 billion under the tobacco deal, but the mechanism is the same: attorneys general extracting behavioral change a divided Congress has not legislated.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita framed it that way, saying it is "not just about money, it's about changing how these platforms operate so they stop exploiting the developing brains of our kids," and adding that states will pursue similar terms from Discord, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the framework sets "the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us."
For families, the practical near-term change is that a teen's Instagram will behave differently by default, and parents get real controls without having to negotiate them app by app. For schools, the honest read is that the school day just got slightly quieter on one set of apps, while the device in the student's pocket still reaches everything else. That is why the classroom rules being written state by state still matter, and why the teenagers themselves have been ahead of the adults on some of this, as we saw when 98 teens wrote a tech policy Congress has not.
Sources
Meta: Our agreement with bipartisan attorneys general
Axios: Time limits, School Mode, Meta agrees to curb kids' access
Settlement figures reflect Meta's own disclosure; the deal is pending judicial approval.
