A trial was planned on 25th September in the southern U.S. state with allegations that TikTok deceived parents into believing that its tools would protect kids from harmful content.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall called the settlement “a great day for Alabama parents.”
“Now they can sleep better because there are true safeguards in place to keep their children safe from the risk of social media addiction,” he added.
TikTok will pay up to $100 million to Alabama and may be able to pay as much as $300 million in total if other states sign similar deals.
Alabama’s lawsuit joins a string of lawsuits filed by states in the U.S. against social media platforms for purportedly harming young people through their apps.
Meta has already agreed in August to pay $18 billion in compensation for a broad-based lawsuit filed by U.S. states alleging it was responsible for creating Instagram and Facebook to hook kids.
The agreement with the company, TikTok, is similar to the terms of settlement with Alabama and other companies that include a 2-hour daily time cap on teenagers’ use, school hours restrictions on access after midnight to 6:00 am and disabling notifications while school is in session, among other conditions.
It will also improve age verification, stop teenagers from being able to use beauty filters and provide young users with a non-personalised content feed.
It also has a “conditional restriction” that Meta has agreed to, extending the nighttime shutdown to 10:00 pm to 7:00 am, if other platforms follow suit.
More suits pending
The company has always been focused on creating a safe and positive environment for users to be creative, explore what they’re interested in and interact with others and their community, a company spokesperson told AFP.
“This is part of our tireless efforts and mission to continuously improve our strong safety measures for teens,” the spokesperson continued.
There are still over a dozen different states with lawsuits against TikTok, such as California and New York.
The company has previously settled cases that were on the verge of trial, such as a case brought by a young woman in Los Angeles and a case brought by a Kentucky school district.
But Meta took a different approach and learned a hard lesson from it.
In March, a New Mexico jury ruled that the firm behind Facebook and Instagram would have to pay out $375 million for misleading the public about how safe its services were for children.
Similarly, in the same month, a jury in Los Angeles ruled Meta and Google’s YouTube company liable in the case of a 20-year-old who said she became addicted to social media as a kid and awarded him $6 million.
A trial would have brought TikTok to the attention of the public in a way they would not have been exposed to before, forcing them to show the world how they conduct themselves around security in-house, and have the company documents and testimony read into the record.
In April 2025, Alabama first filed suit against TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance, claiming that the app is designed to entice young users “like a sophisticated gambling machine.
Later, the state argued for a jury in the case against TikTok under Alabama’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act over its claims that it misrepresented the efficacy of its “Restricted Mode” and “Kids Mode”.
However, the platform’s accounts within just a few minutes were swarmed with videos featuring eating disorders, suicide, self-harm, drinking and sex, the filing said, which the TikTok has responded to, even though it claimed that it wouldn’t show any mature content to its users through this feature.
