Indiana stands to collect at least $296 million from Meta Platforms under the settlement Attorney General Todd Rokita announced Wednesday. However, more than 100 Indiana school corporations are still waiting on claims of their own.
The two are separate cases in the same courthouse.
Meta agreed Wednesday to pay $17.1 billion to resolve claims brought by 47 states and four territories that the company designed Instagram and Facebook to addict children and concealed what it knew about the harm. The deal ended a trial that had opened Aug. 18 in Oakland before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, one day after Instagram head Adam Mosseri testified. Meta denies the allegations and admits no liability. The agreement requires court approval.
Rokita’s office says Indiana is guaranteed $296 million and could receive as much as $419.4 million, paid annually over 10 years and earmarked for youth online safety efforts. He called it a milestone for Hoosier families and said the state will keep pursuing similar terms from Discord, Roblox, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.
The settlement also requires Meta to change its platforms for users under 18: a combined two-hour daily limit across Instagram and Facebook, prompts after 15 minutes of continuous use, a block on access from midnight to 6 a.m., notifications suppressed during school hours, stronger age verification and new parental controls. An independent auditor will review compliance annually for five years.
None of that money goes to Indiana schools, and the settlement does not touch the districts’ cases.
Those cases sit in the same multidistrict litigation before the same judge — In re: Social Media Adolescent Addiction/Personal Injury Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 3047, in the Northern District of California. The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation counted 3,137 pending actions in the MDL as of Aug. 3.
A client list dated May 27 and reviewed by Indy Politics names 109 Indiana districts. Kansas City-based Wagstaff & Cartmell, which represents them, told the Crawfordsville Journal Review this week the number is now at least 112, with North Montgomery School Corporation among the recent additions.
Plaintiffs include Indianapolis Public Schools, Fort Wayne Community Schools, Evansville-Vanderburgh, South Bend, Vigo County, Gary, Elkhart, Muncie and Monroe County. In Marion County, IPS, the Metropolitan School Districts of Washington and Wayne townships, Beech Grove City Schools and the School Town of Speedway are on the list; Pike, Lawrence, Warren, Perry, Decatur and Franklin townships are not. Neither are Zionsville, Brownsburg, Danville, Anderson or Kokomo. Carmel Clay, Noblesville, Hamilton Southeastern, Westfield Washington, Avon, Plainfield and Center Grove have joined.
The districts’ operative pleading is a 324-page master complaint filed in March 2024 raising two claims — public nuisance and negligence — against Meta, Snap, ByteDance’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube. It alleges the companies built their platforms to hook minors and left schools to pay for counselors, crisis teams and safety officers.
The litigation is not a class action. Each district is its own plaintiff, and the firm has said it works on contingency, with no cost to districts if there is no recovery.
The first school-district case set for trial never reached a jury. In May, Meta settled with Breathitt County School District in eastern Kentucky after co-defendants YouTube, Snap and TikTok settled earlier, according to Reuters. Terms were not disclosed. Breathitt, a district of roughly 1,600 students, had sought more than $60 million to cover mental health costs and fund a 15-year abatement program, plus an order requiring the companies to change their platforms.
The Indiana districts’ claims against Snap, TikTok and YouTube also remain open. Rokita’s office said Wednesday the state is still pursuing those companies.
