Meta has agreed to change how Instagram and Facebook work for teenagers in the United States, and Brussels wants the same treatment for Europe. The settlement, reached on 26 August with US state attorneys general, closes the largest child-safety case the company has faced. It commits Meta to payments of up to $18 billion over ten years and, more importantly for regulators, to a list of product changes that European authorities have been demanding for two years.
The question now is whether those changes stop at the US border. Meta says they do. The European Commission says they should not.
Under the settlement, accounts belonging to users under 18 will default to a combined two-hour daily limit across Meta's apps, with a curfew from midnight to 6am. Likes and reaction counts will be hidden on teen accounts, cosmetic-surgery-style filters will be switched off by default, and most push notifications will be silenced during school hours. Parents get broader supervision tools, including alerts when a teen messages an adult for the first time or searches for terms linked to self-harm or eating disorders.
The age-verification clause is the one with teeth. Meta must use age-assurance methods with false-positive rates no higher than 3 per cent for 13-to-15-year-olds and 10 per cent for 16-to-17-year-olds, independently certified and audited every year. Non-personalised feeds are due within four months of court approval, broader compliance within six, and the age-assurance overhaul within a year.
The headline number is softer than it looks. Meta has committed to about $12.7 billion, roughly 70 per cent of the total. The remaining $5 billion or so is payable only if TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube adopt comparable measures and pay comparable sums. Meta has also said it would cut the daily limit to one hour if its rivals do the same. Reporting of the total has varied between $16.7 billion and $18 billion depending on whether Texas's separate settlement is included; the Commission's own references use the higher figure.
Henna Virkkunen, the Commission's Executive Vice-President for tech sovereignty, said the Commission expects Meta and TikTok to bring the same design changes to the EU. Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier put it more bluntly: Meta knows what is expected of it, and the ball is in Meta's court.
The Commission has the legal groundwork already in place. In February it issued preliminary findings that TikTok's design breaches the Digital Services Act by exposing teenagers to addictive features. In April it did the same to Meta over under-13 access, finding that Facebook and Instagram let children enter a false birth date without meaningful verification. Both cases are open, and a confirmed breach can cost up to 6 per cent of global turnover.
Virkkunen has also confirmed that a European age-verification proposal is coming. The Commission already has an app, built on zero-knowledge cryptography so that platforms receive only a yes-or-no answer rather than personal data, and it has recommended that member states make it available by the end of 2026. Virkkunen has called effective age verification "the next piece of the puzzle." She has, however, argued against separate national age-limit schemes of the kind France, Denmark and others are pursuing, on the grounds that a patchwork undermines the single market and the DSA alike.
Until last month Meta's defence in Brussels rested on feasibility: age assurance is an industry-wide problem, precise limits are technically hard, and design changes carry trade-offs. The US settlement removes most of that argument. Meta has now agreed, in writing, to audited accuracy thresholds, default time limits and feature restrictions. If they can be built for California, the Commission can reasonably ask why they cannot be switched on in Cologne.
Meta's position is that the settlement terms apply in the US only. That is legally true and politically fragile. The company is already facing a DSA case whose remedies overlap almost exactly with what it just conceded to 48 US states.
The US settlement was reached through litigation; Europe's route runs through regulation, and the two are now converging on the same product. That gives the Commission its strongest hand yet in the DSA cases, and it will be hard for Meta to offer Europeans less than it offered Americans. The harder question is who decides. Eight member states have told Brussels they prefer their own age-check systems, and several want outright bans for under-15s or under-16s, which the DSA does not provide. A Commission that is winning the argument with Meta could still lose it with the capitals. The coming age-verification proposal will show whether Brussels wants one European rule or is prepared to live with 27.
