Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier rejected the multistate settlement Meta struck with more than 50 states over Instagram and Facebook's harm to teenagers, calling the roughly $18 billion deal "peanuts" and pledging to pursue a jury trial instead. [1] The rejection is the first real-world test of a thesis this paper has pressed since Wednesday — that the settlement functions less as a financial penalty than as the price of ending litigation risk on Meta's own terms. A state government just agreed, on the record, that the price is too low.
"Trying to wipe out a decade of harm to the nation's youth with one month's cash flow is an insult," Uthmeier said in a statement. "We'll see them at trial." [1] In a follow-up post on X quoting Meta's own announcement, Uthmeier added: "Corporations like Meta will never learn a lesson if they don't incur real costs for breaking the law." [1] Florida was not alone in staying out of the settlement — New Mexico also declined, but for a different reason: it already won a trial against Meta earlier this year and secured almost $1 billion in payouts on its own, a larger per-capita recovery than the multistate deal offers most participants. [2] Georgia, by contrast, will collect roughly $100 million through the settlement, illustrating the wide range of outcomes states accepted by joining rather than litigating. [2]
Uthmeier's rejection lands directly on the fault line this paper identified Friday when Fortune ran an outside academic's analysis concluding the settlement amounts to roughly 1 percent of Meta's expected revenue over the decade it covers — a framing this paper had credited to X commentary two days earlier, before Fortune's independent version appeared. [3] Uthmeier's "peanuts" framing points the same direction without citing the same math: both readings conclude the settlement is priced too small to change Meta's behavior. Meta itself has told investors the deal will not alter its financial guidance beyond a single one-time quarterly expense of roughly $10 billion — a number that a company posting close to $18 billion in net income in a single recent quarter can absorb without disturbing its underlying business. [4]
The settlement Florida is walking away from requires sweeping behavioral changes for teen accounts: a two-hour daily time limit on Facebook and Instagram (which parents can disable), an overnight block from midnight to 6 a.m., muted notifications during school hours, escalating usage warnings, hidden like counts, a ban on extreme cosmetic photo filters, autoplay disabled by default, and expanded parental controls that flag suspicious contacts and settings changes. [3] Meta explicitly framed the settlement as a template it wants TikTok and YouTube to adopt as well, arguing that restricting teens on one platform simply pushes them to another. [3] Neither company had responded publicly to that invitation as of Saturday.
Uthmeier's rejection did not happen in isolation from his broader record this week. His office also announced a separate $1.2 million settlement with the accounting firm Deloitte over diversity-related employment practices Uthmeier said discriminated against white and male workers — part of a coordinated, Trump-aligned national effort in which Deloitte separately agreed to pay $21.5 million to the Department of Justice and $1.2 million to Indiana under parallel federal and state claims. [2] The pairing is not coincidental to Uthmeier's political brand: an attorney general positioning himself as tough on corporate accountability in two very different registers within the same week, one aimed at a trillion-dollar tech company's teen-safety record, the other at a professional-services firm's hiring practices.
What Florida's rejection does not resolve is whether other states follow its lead before the settlement's court approval process concludes. Forty-seven states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories remain inside the deal, guaranteeing the bulk of its roughly $12.7 billion in committed payouts regardless of what Florida or New Mexico do independently. [3] But Uthmeier's trial threat, if it proceeds, would put Meta's internal knowledge of youth-safety harms back under the kind of direct courtroom scrutiny the original settlement was designed to avoid — the same scrutiny that had Instagram chief Adam Mosseri testifying about the company's delayed rollout of screen-time tools before the broader deal cut the California trial short. [4]
-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco