A nationwide legal settlement against Meta has brought a $76 million payout to Hawai‘i.
Hawai‘i was one of 47 states — as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands — to sue the social media company Meta in 2023, alleging that the company has misled the public about its products’ addictiveness to children.
But on Wednesday, Meta and the states entered into a $17.1 billion settlement agreement, about $76 million of which will go to Hawai‘i.
Toni Schwartz, public information officer for the state Department of the Attorney General, told Aloha State Daily that the settlement funds will be deposited into the department’s “Litigation Deposits Trust Account,” but the future use of those funds has not yet been determined.
“The adverse mental health consequences associated with excessive, unregulated access to social media are well-documented,” state Attorney General Anne Lopez said in a statement Wednesday. “Despite knowledge of the consequences, social media companies failed to act independently to protect our youth.”
The states, including Hawai‘i, argued in their filings that Meta used its platforms, Facebook and Instagram, to collect data from underage users in violation of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and that Meta’s failure to properly inform users of the potential dangers of those platforms to young people constituted a deceptive practice.
The suit highlighted some features of Meta’s platforms, such as their “endless scroll,” and noted that millions of teens use the platforms in a regular basis.
Also cited in the case were internal documents from the company that indicated that some employees were aware of the platforms’ addictive behavior. One such document read “our product exploits weaknesses in the human psychology to promote product engagement and time spent [on the platforms]; another read “people are binging on [Instagram] so much they can’t feel reward anymore … It’s biological and psychological … the top-down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more.”
As for the violations of COPPA, the plaintiffs noted that Meta extracts data from all users and, although it takes some measures to remove users under the age of 13 from its platforms, Meta had “actual knowledge” of underage users and still used their personal data to train its machine learning and generative AI models.
Four of the states involved in the suit — California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey — went to trial in California last week. The settlement cuts that trial short, and requires Meta to implement a series of new safety features on Facebook and Instagram to protect young users.
Those safety measures include hard time limits for underage users — the platforms would implement mandatory pauses every 15 minutes of continuous use and cap total daily time to two hours — blocks preventing underage users from accessing the platforms at all between midnight and 6 a.m., disabling push notifications for the platforms during school days, limits on social comparison features — such as beauty filters and “like” counts, both linked to reduced mental health among young users — and stronger age-appropriate content controls and age verification measures.
The settlement also resolves another claim by Hawai‘i against Meta for sharing non-public Facebook user data with third parties like consulting firm Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 election. Hawai‘i's share of that settlement will be about $4.5 million, which Schwartz told ASD will be deposited into the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs’ Compliance Resolution Fund “for continued consumer protection initiatives on behalf of the state and its residents.”
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