Hawaii to receive up to $76M in Meta settlement forcing child-safety changes

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Hawaii is part of a $17.1 billion multistate settlement with social media giant Meta Platforms that forces the company to implement sweeping child-safety measures on Facebook and Instagram.

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The Hawaii Attorney General’s Office described the agreement as one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history, second only to the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

Under the settlement, Hawaii will receive up to $76 million.

If approved by the court, the deal will end a trial that began in California last week.

“The safety features, processes, and independent monitoring required by this settlement will have a real-world positive impact for youth in Hawai‘i,” said Attorney General Anne Lopez. “I hope that Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube will read the writing on the wall and enter into similar settlements.”

Hawaii joined the lawsuit with 46 other states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The suit claimed Meta designed the platforms with addictive features, knowingly exposed users to serious mental health harms, and intentionally misled the public.

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Safety features required in children’s accounts under the settlement include:

Beginning in 2021, nearly every attorney general in the country cooperated to investigate the social media industry for designing and promoting platforms to children and teens despite known harms.

After a bipartisan, nationwide investigation found that Meta designed Instagram’s features to addict children while internally documenting the resulting mental health harms and failing to warn parents, attorneys general across the country sued Meta individually or as part of a consolidated federal lawsuit. This settlement resolves those cases and claims by the other settling states and territories.

The settlement also resolves the states’ claims against Meta for its sharing of nonpublic information about Facebook users with third parties, like Cambridge Analytica, leading up to the 2016 election. Hawaiʻi will also receive $4,685,127 for the Cambridge Analytica claim.

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