Florida Won't Take Meta's $18B Deal: Boot Every Under-14

By TechPulse USA Newsroom

Every other state in America took the money. Forty-eight of them, plus Washington DC, signed off on a deal that could cost Meta up to $18 billion over ten years and rewrite the teen experience on Instagram and Facebook everywhere else. Then Florida's attorney general filed in a Pasco County court on October 7 and asked a judge for something the money could never buy: identify every user under 14 in the state and throw them off Meta's apps, then put Florida's teenagers on a two-hour daily ration of Instagram and Facebook.

It is, by some distance, the most aggressive move any state has made against Meta since the company settled the biggest child-safety case in American history — and it is happening precisely because Florida refused to settle at all.

Instagram on a smartphone — the app Florida's attorney general wants scrubbed of every user under 14 in the state. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki (Zunter), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

What Florida asked a judge to order

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier's request — a motion for a temporary injunction, filed in Pasco County — reads like a product manager's to-do list, only enforced by the state. The headline demand: Meta must identify every user in Florida under the age of 14 and remove them from Instagram and Facebook.

For teenagers, the state wants a hard two-hour daily cap on screen time, measured across all of Meta's apps combined — not two hours per app, two hours total. Autoplay and infinite scroll would be switched off for teen accounts. Once the daily limit is hit, teens would lose access to messaging as well. And Meta would be barred from showing them advertisements, full stop.

Florida asked for the changes to take effect immediately and stay in place while the underlying lawsuit moves toward trial. One caution that matters: a motion is an ask, not an order. We checked the motion's trail across outlets this week, and reporting as recent as October 9 describes the injunction request as still pending — no judge has granted it yet.

The $18 billion deal Florida walked away from

To grasp how extraordinary that filing is, you have to look at what the other 48 states plus DC accepted. In August, after a landmark federal trial in California had already opened, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion — spread over a decade — and to rebuild the teen experience on its platforms.

The case that forced the deal was enormous. Twenty-nine states had accused Meta of deliberately engineering Facebook and Instagram to hook young users, misleading the public about the risks, and unlawfully collecting data from children under 13. Meta itself warned that a courtroom loss could have exposed it to more than $1 trillion in penalties. Fifty-one states and territories plus DC eventually settled; Texas struck a separate agreement that took the total payout to roughly $18 billion, and a federal judge approved the deal.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who co-led the litigation alongside Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, sold it as a transformation: "Meta has agreed to make massive transformations that will reduce the risk of harm," he said in a statement, adding that the company would do it within months. He called the outcome "real change, real transparency, and real enforceable protections for children."

The substance is real enough: a default two-hour daily limit for users under 18, a midnight-to-6 a.m. blackout on app access, muted notifications during school hours, limits on visible likes on teen accounts, a ban on cosmetic-surgery filters for minors, the option of a non-algorithmic feed, and stronger parental controls. There is even a clause designed to drag Meta's rivals in: about 30 per cent of the payout — roughly $5.3 billion — is released to the states only if YouTube and TikTok adopt similar protections.

Meta denied any wrongdoing in the settlement. And the maths explains why it was happy to settle: the full payout represents about three to four months of profit — roughly one month of revenue. For a company this size, it was the corporate equivalent of a parking ticket.

Florida's State Capitol in Tallahassee — the state is now Meta's last big courtroom adversary on child safety. Photo: DXR, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

"A mere slap on the wrist"

That parking-ticket comparison is essentially Florida's argument, and the state made it in the filing itself. The settlement, Florida told the court, amounted to a "mere slap on the wrist" that would be "cynically viewed as the cost of doing business" and would not stop the behaviour going forward.

Uthmeier announced the rejection the way Florida politicians do now — with posts on X. He called the payouts "peanuts" next to the damage Meta's features had inflicted on children, and branded the deal "a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corp." His closing line to Meta: "We'll see them at trial." In another post, he wrote that a company like Meta would "never learn a lesson if they don't incur real costs."

He also went after Meta's story about itself. In a post flagged by local coverage, Uthmeier claimed Meta had told parents Instagram and Facebook were safe while its own research showed "anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and predators in DMs." And Florida's lawyers made a clever procedural point: the fact that Meta agreed to change its products for the other states is proof, they argued, that the changes Florida is demanding are perfectly possible — the company cannot now claim they are technically unbuildable.

Meta's response was a counterpunch aimed at the rest of the industry. A company spokesperson said the attorney general should be "using taxpayer resources to get YouTube and TikTok to empower parents" instead of pursuing what it called a "meritless preliminary injunction years into the litigation."

That is the you're-suing-the-wrong-app defence — and Meta is running it on two fronts. In its own settlement materials, the company warned that "when teens are restricted on one app, they'll simply move to another," urging TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same standards.

The second front in Meta's child-safety war

Florida is not the only state still fighting. New Mexico never settled either — its case produced a jury and court award worth hundreds of millions, plus protections the national deal lacks, ahead of a penalty hearing on October 1 that could push Meta's total exposure toward the tens of billions. Florida and New Mexico are now the two holdouts proving that the $18 billion deal was a floor for Meta's liability, not a ceiling.

The pressure is not just American. In Australia, the eSafety commissioner has been pressing Steam over kid safety, part of a worldwide wave of age limits and school phone bans driven by anger at what social platforms do to children. Meta, meanwhile, is still facing thousands of personal-injury claims and lawsuits from school districts that the state settlement does not touch.

And the company keeps denying the underlying charges. When we covered Meta's flat denial that its AI reads your private messages, the pattern was the same one running through this case: admit nothing, settle when the maths works, fight when it doesn't.

What happens next — and why it could matter more than the money

Here is our take: Florida's gambit is the only move in this entire saga aimed at Meta's product rather than Meta's wallet, and that makes it the one the company should fear most. Fines are a line item. A court order dictating autoplay, infinite scroll, messaging and advertising for tens of millions of users is a redesign imposed by a judge in Pasco County — a precedent that would travel to every statehouse in America. If Florida wins this injunction, the $18 billion deal starts to look like the opening bid, not the settlement.

But it is a long shot, and we should be honest about that. Courts are far more comfortable writing cheques than writing product specifications, and forcing a private company to rebuild its software for one state's teenagers is exactly the kind of order appellate courts love to second-guess. Florida is pushing on every front at once — its HB 3 teen social-media law was reportedly reinstated by a federal appeals court this month, according to local outlets, letting Uthmeier start enforcement there too. Still, between the two, the injunction is the sharper weapon: it targets Meta's design choices directly, at trial, with the discovery and testimony a settlement would have buried.

That is presumably the point. Settlements buy silence; trials buy sunlight. And whether the Pasco County judge grants the order or not, Uthmeier has already exposed the settlement's biggest weakness: Meta agreed to the very changes Florida is demanding, which means it always could. The only question left is who has to force the issue — 48 attorneys general at a negotiating table, or one judge in Florida.

Sources

Reuters (Diana Novak Jones, Oct 7, 2026); CNA; Economic Times; NPR (Aug 26, 2026 settlement coverage); citizen.digital; TechXplore; Fox 35 Orlando; NeoTeo; Primetimer.

TechPulse USA Newsroom is our US-based reporting team covering artificial intelligence and the technology reshaping the world.

Florida v. Meta teen injunction FAQ: what the court case means

What exactly is Florida asking a judge to order? A temporary injunction: identify every Florida user under 14 and remove them from Instagram and Facebook; cap teen use at two hours a day across all Meta apps combined; disable autoplay and infinite scroll for teens; cut messaging once the daily limit is hit; ban ads to teenagers.

Is the order in effect? No. As of Oct. 12 reporting, no judge had ruled and no hearing date had been reported (MedicalDaily, Oct. 14). Until a judge acts, nothing changes on Florida teens' accounts — and any order could be appealed.

What did the other states accept? In August, 51 states and territories plus DC settled with Meta for up to ~$18B over ten years: a default two-hour daily limit for under-18s, a midnight-to-6am blackout, no cosmetic-surgery filters for minors, non-algorithmic feed options — and ~$5.3B tied to YouTube and TikTok adopting similar protections.

Is Florida enforcing its own teen social-media law? Yes. The 11th Circuit reinstated HB 3 (under-14 accounts barred; parental consent for 14–15s) on Oct. 7, and Uthmeier can enforce it — though a Tampa Bay 28 reporter opened an Instagram account for a 13-year-old test profile on Monday, showing compliance is uneven.

Who else is still fighting Meta? New Mexico never settled either (its case produced a jury and court award worth hundreds of millions, ahead of a penalty hearing), plus thousands of personal-injury claims and school-district lawsuits the state settlement does not touch — part of a worldwide wave of age limits sweeping platforms, from the UK's under-16 ban push to Australia's eSafety commissioner pressing Steam over kid safety.

Update, Oct. 14: Florida's other front just got hotter — and messier

The 11th Circuit lifted the injunction blocking HB 3 last week (Tampa Bay 28, Oct. 14), the state's 2024 law barring under-14s from social media accounts and requiring parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds — meaning Attorney General James Uthmeier can start enforcing it immediately while the underlying lawsuit continues. But enforcement looks wobbly in practice: the same outlet's reporter opened an Instagram account for a 13-year-old test profile on Monday — a step HB 3 is designed to block — and Meta did not respond to a request for comment. Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell warned the state against using the law "as a political weapon… to pressure companies into bending to the state of Florida's political will." As for the headline Pasco County injunction motion against Meta itself, MedicalDaily reported on Oct. 14 that no court had ruled and no hearing date had been reported as of Oct. 12 — so the under-14 boot order is still an ask, not a law.