Tennessee Attorney General and Reporter Jonathan Skrmetti (R) plans to file “more litigation” against social media companies whose addictive platforms are harming children, he announced Thursday in an interview on “Washington Watch.” Skrmetti and his team helped lead a nationwide investigation against Meta, which resulted in the parent company of Facebook and Instagram reaching an unprecedented settlement.
On Wednesday, Skrmetti’s office announced a $17.1 billion settlement with Meta involving 47 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. That figure represents roughly one month of revenue and three to four months of profit for Meta, a sizable chunk.
Skrmetti celebrated the bipartisanship of the coalition holding Meta accountable, especially the cooperation between his office and that of Colorado’s progressive attorney general. “This really was a massive bipartisan nationwide effort by the state AGs,” he said. “You had a coalition of states suing in federal district court. You had different states on both sides of the aisle suing in their own courts. We were sharing litigation strategy. We were sharing experts. We were talking to the whistleblowers together.”
Tennessee’s cut of the settlement payout totaled $750 million, which will go toward Tennessee’s new Children’s Digital Protection Fund.
The only three states not included in the settlement were Florida, New Mexico, and Texas. Earlier this month, New Mexico won $567 million from Meta at trial. Texas reached a separate settlement for more than $1 billion. Florida continues to hold out for a more punitive resolution.
“We all recognize the problems here, I think, anybody who’s seen kids sitting there with a phone, just scrolling mindlessly for hours, especially parents who try to stop it and have had trouble,” Skrmetti said.
“We brought these cases because Instagram was hurting kids,” he added. “The way it was designed was addictive. Kids’ brains are different. They were getting really negative mental health impacts from this. And the company was misleading parents about the safety of the platform. … Short of legislation, this is the best possible outcome we could get.”
Accordingly, the nationwide settlement compels Meta to implement substantial changes to accounts for young users. Meta must cap youth accounts at two hours of use per day and implement “productive pauses” that intervene “after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling.” Meta must also block access on youth accounts from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. and eliminates push notifications during school hours (from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays).
Under the settlement, Meta must also implement stricter age verification measures, to prevent children under 13 from obtaining an account, and to prevent teens from pretending to be adults. This will be accompanied by stronger age-appropriate content controls, user-friendly parental controls, and stronger safeguards against content that promotes bullying, eating disorders, and self-harm. The settlement will also include “limits on social comparison features for young users, including beauty filters and visible ‘like’ counts, that have been linked to poor mental health outcomes in kids and teens,” Skrmetti’s office said.
Skrmetti said the Meta settlement will free up his office to pursue other social media companies for similar violations. “The other companies are … nervous right now,” he exclaimed. “I expect we’re going to see the next domino fall very soon. There’s litigation against each of the other big companies. There’s going to be more litigation. I know we didn’t sue everybody we wanted to, because we were tied up with Meta. Well, that case is gone now. So, we’re going to be filing some additional litigation.”
“The fewer companies that stay standing with these addictive and exploitive processes, the harder it’s going to be for them to remain,” argued Skrmetti. “And, of course, once we take care of social media, we’re going to be keeping a very vigilant eye on all the new AI products that are potentially going to be facing kids.”
In fact, the Meta settlement has built-in mechanisms that incentivize state attorneys general to pursue litigation against other social media companies. The two-hour daily limit for teen use remains in effect for five years, according to Skrmetti’s office. But, “if Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube adopt comparable terms, the daily limit on each platform will drop to 60 minutes for 10 years.”
“The bottom line with this — and, I think, the reason that we were able to get Meta to agree to this — is because we’re right. This stuff is dangerous,” Skrmetti insisted. “These people are parents, and they don’t want their kids to be subject to this. A lot of them don’t let their kids use their own technology for that very reason.”
