Security3 publishers2 min readPublished
TikTok will cap Alabama children at two hours a day under $100m settlement
TikTok will pay Alabama $100m and cap children's use at two hours a day to settle the state's addictive-design lawsuit. Meta agreed to comparable limits with the state in August, so both companies now owe Alabama time limits and night blocks for children.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- The deal was reached just before a jury trial set to begin on Monday, and it is TikTok's first settlement with a US state.
- The time limit and the overnight and school-hour blocks take effect immediately, while age verification and other changes have up to a year.
- Teen accounts get non-personalized feeds by default and a blanket ban on cosmetic filters, according to Bloomberg Law.
- TikTok will limit how easily adults can find children's accounts and will alert parents to "suspicious interactions" between teens and adults.
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Why it matters
- constraint Because the terms apply only in Alabama, TikTok has to tell Alabama children apart from other US users and serve them a separately configured app.
- exposure For up to a year, the two-hour cap can reach only accounts TikTok already identifies as children, since the age verification meant to find young users is not yet due.
- contradiction The coverage disagrees on the maximum bill. Turkiye Today calls the up-to-$300m an additional payment, which puts the total at up to $400m, while Bloomberg Law's headline puts the whole settlement at up to $300m.
"This is very restrictive injunctive relief that's going to require them to change a lot of the policies that we had identified as the culprits in what we call the war on childhood," Katherine Robertson, chief counsel in the Alabama Attorney General's office, said in an interview with the BBC [9]. She said the state had been in mediation with TikTok in the run-up to trial and that the deal reached was the state's final offer [10].
Attorney General Steve Marshall's office filed the suit in 2025. It accused TikTok and ByteDance of building an algorithm designed to addict young users and of misleading parents about the platform's safety [12]. It pointed to links between heavy use and depression and self-harm [13]. ByteDance signed the settlement too. It remains a minority owner of TikTok's US joint venture [14].
The settlement answers a product-design complaint with product changes. Beyond the time cap and the blocks, the terms give parents tools to heavily moderate their children's use, restrict some content and require new ways to verify the age of young users, according to the BBC [11].
Alabama has used this set of terms before. Marshall's office settled with Meta in August for more than $117m, with daily time limits, nighttime access blocks and limited notifications during school hours on Instagram and Facebook [15]. The two deals together bring the state more than $217m [1]. A daily time cap, a night block and a school-hours restriction appear in both [2] [15].
The BBC described the Alabama case as mirroring a host of lawsuits against social media platforms [20]. The sources show one attorney general getting the same controls from two companies within months. They do not show another state asking for them, and the TikTok changes apply only in Alabama [5].
TikTok presented the terms as a continuation of its existing work. "This builds on our commitment and core objective to continually enhance our robust safety tools to protect teens," a spokesperson for TikTok USDS said [19].
What to watch
- Whether TikTok pays the $100m inside the 45-day window the settlement sets.
- Which age-verification method TikTok builds for Alabama within its one-year window, and whether it runs anywhere outside the state.
- Whether another state attorney general asks TikTok or Meta for the same time, night and school-hour controls.