PUERTO RICO — Puerto Rico’s Department of Justice announced on Wednesday, August 26, that the island will receive $124.7 million from Meta Platforms as part of a sweeping multi-state settlement resolving claims that the company designed Instagram and Facebook to be addictive to children and knowingly concealed the resulting mental health harms.
How Puerto Rico’s Case Started
The settlement resolves a lawsuit Puerto Rico’s Department of Justice filed on December 19, 2024, in San Juan’s Court of First Instance, in which the government’s Office of Monopolistic Affairs argued that Meta engineered Instagram and Facebook specifically to generate addiction among minors, and misled the public about the mental health damage its platforms caused young users.
Justice Secretary Lourdes L. Gómez Torres said the lawsuit’s claims cited a striking statistic: approximately 76% of children and adolescents in Puerto Rico use Instagram, and more than two million island residents — well over half the population — use at least one Meta platform.
What Puerto Rico Will Receive
Under the settlement, Puerto Rico is guaranteed $124.7 million, payable in ten installments, with the potential to receive an additional $53.7 million contingent on TikTok, YouTube, and Snap adopting equivalent child-safety protections.
“Today we secure $124.7 million to address those damages, and more importantly, concrete, audited changes in how Instagram and Facebook treat our minors,” Gómez Torres said in a statement, calling the outcome “a judicial milestone for Puerto Rico.”
At least half of the funds are designated specifically to remediate harm to Puerto Rican children and youth, in coordination with the island’s Department of Health, its Mental Health and Anti-Addiction Services Administration (ASSMCA), and its Department of Education.
Puerto Rico’s agreement is one piece of a far larger multistate transaction, negotiated by a coalition of more than 40 jurisdictions led by the attorneys general of Colorado and Tennessee, resolving both a consolidated federal multidistrict lawsuit based in California and numerous individual state court cases nationwide.
Meta’s total exposure across the full settlement reaches up to $17.1 billion — described by multiple state attorneys general as the largest state consumer protection settlement in U.S. history outside the 1990s tobacco settlements, and, according to Puerto Rico’s Justice Department, the largest such action ever brought jointly by state and territorial justice secretaries against a single company.
The settlement also resolves separate claims tied to Meta’s sharing of nonpublic Facebook user data with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, ahead of the 2016 U.S. election.
Meta has agreed to the settlement to avoid prolonged litigation but has not admitted wrongdoing or legal responsibility for the allegations.
Which Jurisdictions Joined — and Which Didn’t
In addition to Puerto Rico, the settlement includes 47 U.S. states, American Samoa, the District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands.
Florida is not part of the agreement and has said it intends to continue litigating its claims against Meta separately. New Mexico also did not join the settlement, though its attorney general, Raúl Torrez, characterized the broader deal as “real progress” that adds momentum toward protecting children online even without New Mexico’s direct participation.
Beyond the financial payout, the settlement requires Meta to implement specific, verifiable design changes to how minors experience Instagram and Facebook, with compliance monitored by an independent auditor over five years. Required measures include a new age-verification system designed to identify teenage and under-13 users with measurable accuracy targets, mandatory usage breaks during platform sessions, nighttime usage controls, a 15-minute continuous-use limit, and a cumulative daily use limit set between 60 and 90 minutes.
Puerto Rico’s Department of Justice said it will submit the consent judgment to the island’s Court of First Instance in the coming days for formal approval, a step other participating jurisdictions are taking in parallel as the broader multistate settlement moves toward court approval nationwide.
Once finalized, the agreement would establish one of the most detailed, independently audited frameworks yet imposed on a major social media platform specifically to address its effects on children and teenagers.
