Attorney General McCuskey announces landmark national settlement against Meta
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Attorney General McCuskey announces landmark national settlement against Meta
Robert Fields | WVOW News
CHARLESTON West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey announced a landmark national settlement Wednesday in a lawsuit against the social media company Meta.
McCuskey says West Virginia’s share of the settlement will be upwards of $114 million, an amount he says will be distributed and spent in efforts to ensure security for children’s mental health and futures.
However, McCuskey said it's not just about the dollar amount.
“More important than the money, I think, is probably the injunctive relief. So, what we have settled here today and what Meta has agreed to do is not just pay us $114 million, but to also make their platform better, more usable and, importantly, safer for children,” McCuskey told reporters. “There’s going to be caps on how long the children can use the platform during the day; there’s going to be times where the platform is unavailable to children of certain ages, meaning they can’t use them during school.”
McCuskey said the settlement also ensures Meta will require minors to take mandatory breaks from its social media platforms to break the cycle of doom scrolling. Moreover, he said there will be more robust age verification implemented to ensure that parents know their children are not interacting with adults posing as children.
On top of that, he says the platform will create an option for parents to turn off Facebook’s algorithm, meaning minors will only be able to view content from people and pages they specifically follow.
“The hope here is that the extreme mental anguish, the suicide rates that are coming from these platforms and the general overall usage of these platforms will decrease, and we will start to see our kids outside, riding their bikes, interacting with each other in person and doing all of the things that we all did as children a little bit more often, because we know that playing outside is a lot better than scrolling on Facebook, not just for your mental health but for your physical health as well,” he said.
McCuskey praised the attorneys general of the 30 other states that participated in the lawsuit against Meta, calling it an effort that transcended party lines for the safety of the nation’s youth.
“When there’s a big problem that’s affecting the children of this country, we all put our partisan politics to the side and we do the real work to protect American families, and I’m very, very proud to be a part of a bipartisan national settlement that is going to do exactly that,” he said.
