Forty-seven states looked at a $17.1 billion settlement from Meta and said yes. Florida looked at the same deal, said the number was too small for a trillion-dollar corporation, and walked away from the table.
That's not a typo. Seventeen billion wasn't enough.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced Wednesday that the Sunshine State would not be joining the landmark settlement resolving allegations that Meta deliberately engineered Facebook and Instagram to addict children. The deal — the largest tech-industry payout ever recorded in a single case — requires Meta to pay between $12.1 billion and $17.1 billion over ten years and make a series of platform changes aimed at protecting minors.
Uthmeier wasn't diplomatic about his reasoning. "The payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta's profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids, and a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corp that'll pay more to lawyers than to the states," he wrote on X. "We'll see them at trial."
The settlement resolves a federal trial in which 29 states alleged Meta — led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg — knowingly designed its platforms to hook young users and then hid the risks from the public. The states accused Meta of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act by collecting data on children under 13 without parental consent. As part of the deal, Meta agreed to impose a two-hour daily combined limit on Instagram and Facebook for minors, mandatory breaks after extended scrolling, feed blackouts from midnight to 6 a.m., silenced notifications during overnight and school hours, enhanced age verification, and limits on beauty filters and visible "like" counts.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb called the settlement a "monumental public health victory." Virginia secured $353 million. D.C. got between $90.3 and $129.3 million.
So why isn't Florida taking its cut?
Because Uthmeier apparently did the math. A $17.1 billion maximum — spread across 47 states over a decade — works out to a rounding error on Meta's balance sheet. The company's market cap hovers above a trillion dollars. Uthmeier's full statement was blunt: "This agreement is nothing more than a slap on the wrist for a trillion-dollar corporation that has already paid more to its lawyers than it will pay the states."
The platform changes sound reasonable on paper — two-hour limits, overnight blackouts, parental controls. But they're features Meta could have implemented years ago and chose not to, because engagement metrics were more profitable than child safety. The settlement essentially lets Meta pay a fraction of its revenue to codify changes it should have made voluntarily, then call it "reform."
Florida is betting that a courtroom verdict will extract a number that actually stings. Whether that gamble pays off depends on the trial, but the logic is straightforward: if the harm was as profound as 47 attorneys general claimed it was, then the price should reflect it.