This year, we’ve witnessed a tidal wave of positive movement to protect children online with the avalanche of Big Tech legal cases, and Meta is facing some of the most significant consequences. Now Congress has the opportunity to turn that momentum into lasting, industrywide standards.
Meta’s $17 billion settlement with more than 47 state attorneys general is the biggest Big Tech settlement in history. In the context of Meta’s $60.46 plus billion-dollar net income in 2025, the whopping multibillion-dollar settlement is only about 8% of its annual bottom line. I have emphasized for years that if Big Tech companies prioritize the safety of children, it will have a positive effect on their bottom line and their overall market value. Using Meta’s recent financial information, its share count was roughly 2.52 billion, and its market capitalization on Aug. 25 was approximately $1.44 trillion, rising to approximately $1.57 trillion market cap on Sept. 3, just one week after the Aug. 26 settlement was announced. This equates to an increase of about $130 billion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth increased by roughly $17 billion from the increase in the value of his 13% ownership stake in Meta.
Here is what I like about the agreement.
It requires a sweeping set of safety-by-default measures, including limits on children’s daily use, overnight restrictions, reduced notifications during school hours, periodic break reminders, restrictions on certain beauty filters, and stronger parental controls.
Meta structured the deal to be tied to its two leading competitors, TikTok and YouTube, by adopting the time limit and night mode features. Meta’s chief legal officer challenged the rest of the industry to implement similar standards. Otherwise, children will jump platforms in a skinny minute, so standards must be implemented industrywide.
And it’s about time. Enough Is Enough has called for these types of safety-by-design protocols for a long time. But most of the Big Tech platforms have historically opted for profits over safety.
Meta apparently learned an expensive lesson by going to trial earlier this year in California, in which both Meta and YouTube were found liable for causing mental health harm to a young woman, while TikTok and Snap settled. In another case, New Mexico ruled Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to children on its platforms, about $420 million of which will treat young victims. The litigation also exposed troubling evidence about the scale of risks children face on Meta’s platforms, including evidence that over 500,000 children were targeted with sexually inappropriate messages each day.
While the Meta settlement rightly raises the bar for new and critical child safety features to be implemented by the entire industry, children are still not safe online because the agreed-upon safety measures don’t go far enough.
The settlement does not require Meta to turn off by default algorithms that connect children to predators, which often lead youth down dangerous black holes. Nor does it require critical age-verification technologies to keep children under 13 years old off its platforms. Meta should fix both of these.
Other tech platforms have faced additional legal scrutiny. The Department of Justice issued a $400 million settlement with TikTok for alleged violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Roblox has settled with at least five state attorneys general over child safety.
Bottom line, where children play, predators prey. Thorn’s 2025 research found that 1 in 5 teenagers (20%) surveyed said they had experienced sextortion (financial extortion). Childlight Global Child Safety Institute estimates that more than 300 million children worldwide were victims of technology-facilitated sexual exploitation and abuse in the past year. Childlight research also reveals that 1 in 13 (7.7%) surveyed American men have or would engage in sexually explicit webcam or livestream interactions with children.
Ultimately, to make the digital world safer for our children, it will take a combination of Big Tech prioritizing safety over profit, existing laws to be aggressively enforced and funded, legislative action, and active parental involvement.
All tech platforms should ultimately flip the switch to make platforms “safer by design” by default, as opposed to the current business model, where safety defaults are turned off in a “dangerous by design” mode. And that’s why Congress must seize the momentum and act this legislative session to pass critical legislation to leverage these landmark legal cases. However, in just the first six months of this year, the 11 largest tech companies spent almost $42 million on lobbying, employing 324 lobbyists just in the second quarter alone to fight online child protection bills. Hopefully, the Meta lessons will put a stop to this Big Tech lobby immediately.
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To start, the Senate must prioritize passing the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act with its strong duty of care that will better ensure Big Tech industrywide safer-by-design standards, ensuring stronger protections for children. Congress should swiftly pass the bipartisan App Store Accountability Act, in spite of Apple’s and Google’s fierce lobbying against it. The act would empower parents to make more informed decisions about the social media, AI chatbots, and gaming apps their children can use, and would require all platforms, even those not yet created, to comply with app stores’ industrywide safety policies.
Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and Roblox could have avoided these lawsuits altogether by prioritizing child safety over big profits. Meta’s win-win lesson of increasing its market cap by a whopping $130 billion, which increased stockholder value as a result of prioritizing the safety of innocent children, should be a wake-up call for all of Big Tech to follow suit. Meanwhile, the momentum created by these legal victories will continue to garner support to prevent online child exploitation and abuse. Government, law enforcement, industry, educators, and parents must all do their part to fight the war on all fronts to make the internet safer for children and families. An entire generation will be lost if online threats to children are not mitigated now.
Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of Enough Is Enough®, has been fighting to protect children online since 1994. She is an internet safety expert, author, speaker, media commentator, producer, and host of the Emmy Award-winning PBS Internet Safety TV series and host of the podcast Internet Safety, with Donna Rice Hughes. Under her leadership, EIE created the Internet Safety 101 Program curriculum with the Department of Justice.