Meta’s $18B child-safety deal hinges on age verification tech that doesn’t work well

Meta reached an $18 billion settlement on Wednesday over a lawsuit brought by 29 U.S. states concerning children’s safety. The settlement is historic in scale as Meta agrees with a group of 52 attorneys general to implement sweeping changes to how minors use Instagram and Facebook.

The settlement “gives the AGs what they want, which is the political story that they’ve extracted a huge amount of benefit for the public from this settlement, including the platform changes,” Jessica Nall , a technology litigator at Withers, told TechCrunch. But Nall noted the settlement’s real-dollar impact is softer than the headline number suggests. “The fact that it’s being paid over 10 years really does blunt the financial impact of the large number, especially compared to Meta’s annual revenue… We’re talking about one of these tech companies where their annual revenue is larger than the GDP of most European countries.”

Indeed, Meta reported more than $200 billion in total revenue in 2025, which puts the $18 billion price tag in perspective. But the bigger story here isn’t the dollar amount. It’s what Meta now has to build: the most detailed child-safety rules any major platform has agreed to, resting on age-verification technology that still doesn’t work particularly well.

Meta hasn’t admitted wrongdoing, even as it settles allegations that it intentionally designed its platforms to keep children hooked — a common tactic for companies looking to avoid a jury trial, where the risk of a worse outcome is higher. A ruling against Meta could also have jeopardized the legal protections that allow social platforms to escape liability for what users post.

“I think it’s wise of them to try to get out of it, especially without a legal finding against them on any of the First Amendment issues and the Section 230 issues, which are still alive,” Nall said. “That could be existential, potentially, not just for Meta but for every tech company that has a product that engages with users, which is almost all of them.”

Meta’s settlement also reignites ongoing concern over age verification measures that are intended to protect children online but can, in practice, create new privacy risks for both kids and adults.

“This is a classic debate around prioritizing safety over privacy,” Dr. Alexis Ingber , a professor of communications at Syracuse University, told TechCrunch. “The perspective is, if we want to keep children safe on Meta platforms, here are all the design things we’re gonna have to do, but we’re gonna have to also do this age verification thing that’s gonna take away from people’s data privacy and will introduce these new data privacy concerns.”

Under the settlement’s terms, Meta has proposed a list of design changes , including a default two-hour daily screen-time limit for app use, plus prompts that appear every 15 minutes to “encourage intentional use.” Accounts that Meta identifies as belonging to minors will also default to being blocked from Meta apps overnight (between midnight and 6 a.m.) and will have notifications muted during school hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m.).