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Settlements may lack the drama of trials, but they can still be landmark legal wins in their own right. After Meta agreed on Wednesday to settle claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict and harm young users, a debate is already brewing about whether this one qualifies.

Monetarily, it certainly seems to. In unadjusted dollar figures, the roughly $18 billion Meta agreed to pay after a coalition of states sued it in federal court appears to be among the largest civil settlements in U.S. history, behind the $206 billion Big Tobacco forked over starting in the 1990s and the $21 billion BP paid out after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion.

On the other hand, that sum is a pittance for a company with a current market capitalization of about $1.5 trillion, and some of the new rules the social media giant agreed to implement to protect users under 18 appear to have loopholes.

Back up. What prompted the lawsuit in the first place?

In 2023, four states—California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey—led a lawsuit against Meta. They alleged that the company’s platforms harmed kids in violation of both state-level rules and a federal law called the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which bans companies from collecting data from children under the age of 13 without their parents’ approval. The case, which began as a coordinated, bipartisan effort involving attorneys general from 29 states, eventually expanded to encompass 47, as well as the District of Columbia and three U.S. territories.

What do the states say Meta actually did to hurt kids? 

The case, which initially sought about $200 billion in damages, employed a relatively novel legal argument. Rather than trying to hold Meta accountable for the content users might see on its platforms—a strategy that has failed in the past—the states alleged that the company knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive even as it publicly claimed they weren’t. The plaintiffs further argued that those addictive features, which include things like recommendation algorithms and push notifications, have fueled depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and other bad outcomes among kids. The strategy recalls the........

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