Meta Platforms ended California’s high-profile youth-safety trial within hours of jury proceedings, agreeing to a sweeping multistate settlement worth up to about $17 billion over a decade, plus more than $1 billion to Texas, for total potential payments just above $18 billion. The deal, reached with 47 states, the District of Columbia and some U.S. territories, includes roughly 130 pages of platform changes and no admission of wrongdoing, while nearly $5 billion hinges on TikTok and YouTube matching the money and the same teen limits, nighttime blocks and age-assurance tools. Default rules for users under 18 include a two-hour daily cap and a midnight-to-6 a.m. block that only parents can disable; if rivals join, the daily limit falls to one hour and overnight restrictions expand to 10 p.m.–7 a.m., with muted notifications, session prompts, hidden like counts, curbs on cosmetic filters and stronger age checks. Meta must also alert parents when accounts flagged as likely to solicit nudes for blackmail message their children, and when teens engage with suicide, self-harm or eating-disorder content. Trial testimony from former and current staff described years of undercounted harms, defaults blocked over engagement fears, legal scrubbing of teen-risk data and resistance to new safety features after congressional testimony. Meta published an open letter and newspaper ads urging TikTok and YouTube to adopt the framework it had called commercially untenable days earlier; rivals have not publicly commented, while free-speech advocates warn the government-backed terms amount to coerced speech limits.