- Alabama AG Steve Marshall announced a settlement has been reached with TikTok, resolving Alabama’s claims that TikTok designed its platform with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms.
- Under the settlement, Alabama will receive a minimum of $100 million, which is due to the state within 45 days, with the potential to receive up to $300 million more if certain conditions are met. In addition to the payment, TikTok must implement numerous safety features designed to protect children using its platform, including a two hour daily time limit with parental controls that allow parents to further limit the amount of time their children spend on the app, “productive pauses” that interrupt teen users after 15 minute of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes, “nighttime access” that restricts children access from 12:00 am to 6:00 am, restrictions on messaging and push notifications overnight and during school hours, robust age assurance measures to verify the age of users, stronger content moderation provisions, a blanket prohibition on the use of cosmetic filters by teen users, a default non personalized feed for teen users, and more user friendly parental controls.
- Separately, Kansas AG Kris Kobach announced that Kansas has reached a settlement with Roblox over child safety concerns. The settlement requires Roblox to pay $9.8 million to the OAG over three years, to underwrite a $500,000 three-year multimedia public awareness campaign focused on child safety and designed to reach a Kansas audience, and to pay an additional $10 million in damages if Roblox fails to comply with any of its terms.
- Under the agreement, Roblox further has agreed to implement safety measures including but not limited to requiring users to undergo age assurance measures to ensure access to age-appropriate content and chat features, providing expanded parental controls, protecting users under 18 from chat with unknown adults, enhancing chat moderation tools to prevent off-platforming, continuously monitoring for and addressing communication safety issues that arise with changing technology, and prohibiting users under 16 from sending “Robux” to other users and from receiving “Robux” from other users without parental approval.