MEDIA RELEASE
27 August 2026
Federal Member for Fisher Andrew Wallace MP has welcomed the settlement reached this week in a United States Federal Court in Oakland, California, under which Meta Platforms will pay up to AU$25 billion in Australian terms and rebuild significant parts of Facebook and Instagram, resolving claims brought by 48 US States, the District of Columbia and three US territories that the company built products which harmed children.
It is the largest child safety settlement in the company’s history.
Payable over ten years, it is the largest child safety settlement in the company’s history. Teenagers will face a default two-hour daily limit only a parent can lift, notifications switched off between midnight and 6am and muted during school hours, hidden likes, no filters that mimic cosmetic surgery, and new controls on bullying, self harm and eating disorder material.
“Meta has admitted nothing, and I would not insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending otherwise,” Mr Wallace said of the case. “But consider what an “innocent” company has agreed to do: hide the likes, dim the notifications at midnight, silence the phone during maths class, switch off the filters that teach a fourteen-year-old girl what surgery would do for her face and submit itself to an independent auditor for a decade. Meta’s admission that its’ specially designed algorithms are harming young people in particular is not in the wording of the settlement. Their admission is in the remedy.”
“For the better part of twenty years the wealthiest companies in human history have run an uncontrolled experiment on the developing minds of children, without consent and without oversight,” Mr Wallace said. “The results of these algorithms arrived as anxiety and sleeplessness and self loathing, as eating disorders, as self harm, addiction to porn and gambling and endless comparison, and we were assured the fault lay with permissive parents, or with children who lacked self control, or with anyone at all except the engineers who had measured to the second how long they could hold a child’s attention.”
That defence has now been abandoned in an American courtroom for AU$25 billion.”
In June, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute published a decade long study in the Medical Journal of Australia following almost 1,200 Melbourne children from age nine to nineteen. What it found is what we have long suspected.
“Researchers in Melbourne, working with Australian children across ten years, identify two hours a day as the point where the harm becomes visible. Attorneys-General in the United States, working through millions of pages of Meta’s own documents, arrive at two hours a day as the limit they will impose. Meta’s own researchers had a phrase for what they were seeing in teenagers: the narrative of an addict. They had the number too. They simply had no commercial reason to act on it,” Mr Wallace said.
Having chaired the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into age verification for online wagering and online pornography and a separate inquiry into the harms brought about by social media, Mr Wallace said the settlement acknowledges the harm he has spent years pursuing.
“Our committee found that children as young as eight are inadvertently exposed to hard core, violent pornography while simply surfing the internet and on social media,” Mr Wallace said.
“A child does not go looking for this material. It arrives, on a school issued device, in a group chat, in a recommended video, at an age when the child has no social framework for understanding what is being shown to them, and it becomes their education in intimacy.
They are taught that cruelty is desire and that degradation is affection, and some years later we express our national astonishment at the rates of sexual violence among young people. Having chaired inquiries into both online pornography and family, domestic and sexual violence, I can tell you these are not two conversations. They are unequivocally connected.”
Australia has not waited. The social media minimum age took effect on 10 December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s Age Restricted Material Codes commenced in full on 9 March 2026, requiring services that host pornography to put age assurance measures in place or face civil penalties in the millions.
“We were told endlessly that none of this was possible,” Mr Wallace said. “Australia went ahead regardless, the sky did not fall, and the largest social media company on earth has now agreed in an American court to do what we were assured could never be done at all.”
“I want to say something to the parents reading this, and particularly to those who have spent years feeling they were the only household in the street fighting a losing battle over a phone at the dinner table,” Mr Wallace said. “You were not imagining it, you were not being difficult, and you were not failing. You were up against several thousand of the most talented engineers in the world, working with a budget larger than the economies of small nations, whose sole professional objective was to defeat you. That you held the line at all is remarkable.”
“And I want to say something else, because it is the more important thing. This is how it goes. This is precisely how it has always gone. The asbestos was safe until it was not. The cigarettes were harmless until a jury said otherwise. The seatbelt was an intolerable imposition on personal liberty until a skyrocketing road toll settled the argument.
In every one of those cases the industry denied, delayed, funded its own agreeable research and settled without admitting a thing, and in every one of them it lost in the end, because truth is a patient adversary and the evidence does not go away.”
“Civil Rights activist James Baldwin wrote that not everything that is faced can be changed, but that nothing can be changed until it is faced. What happened in Oakland this week is that a great many people finally stopped looking away. This is the biggest bill Meta has ever been handed over what it is doing to our kids, and it should not be the last.”
[ENDS]
Media Contact: Leanne Welch – 0435 249 334 – leanne.m.welch@aph.gov.au