SC to receive upwards of $247M in Meta settlement over child safety on social media

COLUMBIA — Facebook parent company Meta settled a 47-state lawsuit for up to $17.1 billion and vowed to make its social media platforms safer for children.

South Carolina’s share of the settlement will be at least $247 million, and perhaps as much as $350 million, state Attorney General Alan Wilson announced Wednesday.

The court must still sign off on the agreement, and the payments will be in yearly installments over the next decade, with the first payment due 30 days after the judge’s order.

The trial began in California last week and had been expected to last six to eight weeks. Attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey led the case.

South Carolina, along with 25 other states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands were also part of the lawsuit.

The states claimed Meta’s Instagram and Facebook features were designed to drive compulsive use by children and teens while also claiming the platforms were safe for young users.

Immediate changes Meta must implement as part of the settlement include:

• Time limits and “Productive Pauses” for children: for its two platforms, Instagram and Facebook, a combined two-hour daily time limit with mandatory pauses after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes to interrupt endless scrolling.
• “Nighttime blocks” restricting children’s access from 12:00 a.m. to 6:00 a.m.
  Limited school-time access for children, eliminating push notifications on weekdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. during the school year.
• Robust age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users.
• Safer, age-appropriate content controls, including stronger safeguards against bullying, content promoting eating disorders, and content related to suicide and self-harm.
• Stronger, more user-friendly parental controls.

An independent auditor will regularly review the platforms to ensure compliance over a 10-year period.

State Rep. Brandon Guffey, who has championed measures to improve online safety for children since the death of his son four years ago, said it’s less about the dollar amount and more about “how many parents can still tuck their children in at night.”

The Rock Hill Republican’s 17-year-old son Gavin committed suicide in 2022 after a 24-year-old Nigerian man posed as a young woman on Instagram to coerce the teen, as well as several other people, into sending him explicit photos.

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The man, Hassanbunhussein Abolore Lawal, then threatened to leak those photos unless Gavin Guffey continued to send him money, federal prosecutors said in court in January 2025.

After Gavin Guffey’s death, Lawal kept demanding money from other family members, including Brandon Guffey. The case against Lawal is still pending in federal court. Lawal’s attorney declined to comment on the case.

Wilson, a Republican, called the agreement “one of the largest state consumer protection settlements in history outside the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.”

“As a dad to two teenagers who’ve grown up in the digital age, protecting children from Big Tech is personal to me,” he said in a statement. “This settlement doesn’t undo the damage that has been caused, but it’s a strong step in preventing the harms caused by social media to future generations of young people.”

According to the agreement, states may use the funds for a wide variety of preventative measures, such as:

• phone and text-based suicide and crisis hotlines
• after school or summer programs, such as sports, literacy, dance, and other indoor and outdoor activities
• public health advertising
• a public digital education fund
• youth mental health programming
• phone-free school zones
• digital literacy counselors
• training for medical providers on body dysmorphia.

States may also use a portion of the settlement to cover attorneys’ fees and other investigation and litigation costs.

For South Carolina in particular, the agreement said payments will be allocated at the state attorney general’s “sole discretion and in accordance with any and all obligations imposed by law.” The agreement specifically states the money will go into a “consumer protection enforcement fund, consumer education fund, consumer litigation fund, consumer aid fund or revolving fund.”

South Carolina has set up similar settlement funds for doling out grants related to opioid addiction.

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Brandon Guffey would most like to see the money spent on increased mental health care access, especially for teens.

“South Carolina has dropped the ball over the past two decades when it comes to mental health,” he said. “That’s why we have homelessness and overcrowding in jails.”

Guffey also wants to see more money going to educate youth about the potential harms of social media.

He said the success of this or any future lawsuit will be based on whether companies are actually forced to implement changes.

The South Carolina Legislature passed Gavin’s Law, named after Guffey’s son, in 2023, which bans sexual extortion, or “sextortion.”

And this year, it passed a pair of social media laws. One requires companies to estimate the age of users and deactivate any accounts believed to be held by someone age 15 or younger, unless parental consent has been granted and privacy controls are put in place. The other sets design standards for social media platforms in an attempt to make them less addictive to minors.

At the federal level, President Donald Trump in 2025 signed a law requiring social media platforms to remove falsified intimate images and so-called “revenge porn.” Guffey testified in Congress in favor of the legislation.

“I can’t save Gavin but can keep fighting to save another child,” he said.

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As part of Wednesday’s Meta settlement, South Carolina also will receive $8 million from Meta within 30 days for investigations related to Cambridge Analytica. Ahead of the 2016 election, Meta shared nonpublic information about its users with third parties, including the political consulting and data analytics firm, the states allege.

In addition to the guaranteed amounts, South Carolina could be eligible for 10 more installment payments of $10.3 million each. That would bring the grand total to $350 million, but those dollars are contingent upon all other major social media platforms, with annual profits above $10 billion, implementing similar protections for youth.

“Now that Meta has stepped up, TikTok, Snapchat and Google all have to follow,” Guffey said. “It’s time to prioritize protecting children over profits.”

In a statement, Meta called on TikTok and YouTube to join them in making these changes.

“While this is an important step, the fact is that teens move fluidly between dozens of apps a day,” the statement said. “All platforms should empower parents and support teens by putting the same measures in place, because we know that when teens are restricted on one app, they simply move to another.”

Wilson also said this problem for youth safety extends well beyond one company and credited Meta for being the first major platform to reach an agreement.

“I appreciate Meta’s recognition of the harms caused by their platform design and working with attorneys general across the country to reach this historic settlement,” he said in a statement. “Advancements in technology, like social media, connect the world but also come with huge responsibility, and the changes Meta has agreed to make to their platform reflect that.”