OAKLAND, Calif. (AP) — Meta agreed Wednesday to pay up to $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms as part of a landmark legal settlement that ended a trial over teen social media addiction and settled claims filed by nearly every state.

The settlement resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to hook young people’s attention.

The agreement “institutes real change, real transparency, real protections for children and teens across the country,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

If approved by the court, the deal will stop an avalanche of litigation by states against Meta, although the company still faces lawsuits from individuals and school districts throughout the U.S. For the states, the settlement delivers money for mental-health programs for kids, including after-school or summer activities and digital literacy counselors.

Advocates cheered the new protections, including default time limits and the disabling of features such as “like” counts.

But “we cannot truly protect all children and teens until these protections are required on every platform and are permanent — that’s something only Congress can do,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of The Tech Oversight Project.

The settlement will be paid out over 10 years. California will get the largest sum of at least $1.5 billion, but several other states will still collect hundreds of millions of dollars each over the decade.

The settlement “will put an end to these dangerous practices and deliver meaningful relief that will protect children from online harm,” Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said.

Meta urges rivals to adopt similar safety measures

Meta said in a blog post that it was “building on our longstanding efforts to empower parents and support teens.”

“Ensuring teens have a safe and productive experience on our platforms is an absolute imperative for Meta,” the company said. “We want to get this right for parents and teens, and that’s why we partnered with state attorneys general to set a new industry standard.”

The company urged competitors TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar safety measures.

The $18 billion settlement is a fraction of Meta’s 2025 revenue of $201 billion. Meta shares closed up about 1% Wednesday, although they rose as much as 4% during the day.

The agreement cuts short an ongoing court case involving California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey, which were among 29 states that sued Meta in 2023. The federal trial kicked off last week in Oakland, California, where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had been among the witnesses expected to take the stand.

The lawsuit accused Meta of contributing to the youth mental health crisis by deliberately designing features that addict children to its platforms and hiding them from the public. The case also argued that Meta violated federal laws by routinely collecting data on children under 13 without their parents’ consent.

The cases in other states had been expected to go to trial later, but are now resolved. The settlement covers 48 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and some U.S. territories. The only two states to be excluded are New Mexico, which went to trial in its case against Meta and won earlier this year, and Florida, where the attorney general said the settlement was not tough enough on Meta.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier wrote on X that the “payouts are peanuts compared to the profound harms Meta’s profit-driven addictive features inflicted on kids.”

New features to include time limits and curbs on push notifications

Under the proposed settlement, Meta agreed to adopt a series of safety features, including two-hour daily time limits that can only be disabled with a parent’s permission and pauses for children using Instagram and Facebook.

The company will eliminate push notifications during weekday school hours and bring in “robust” age-assurance measures and “age-appropriate” content controls to prevent bullying and harmful material about eating disorders and self-harm.

There will be stronger and more user-friendly parental controls and limits on social comparison features such as “like” counts.

An independent auditor will assess how Meta is implementing the safety features and how effective they are.

The company said 30% of the settlement amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.

Neither YouTube owner Google nor TikTok responded to requests for comments.

Meta officials declined to comment on whether they had conversations with their competitors about those conditions, but said they intentionally designed the agreement with the states to incentivize the rest of the industry to follow suit.

Some of the safety measures Meta will implement, like disabling cosmetic surgery and extreme makeup filters, made sense regardless of whether competing platforms do the same, Meta said. Other features, like the overnight block, will function better if they are established across the board, the company said.

If industry peers sign on to the agreement, Meta will implement stronger defaults for teens’ daily time limit and the length of time for “night mode.”

Investigation was led by bipartisan coalition

The federal lawsuit was the result of an investigation led by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from California, Florida, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, Tennessee and Vermont. It followed newspaper reports, first by The Wall Street Journal in 2021, that found the company knew about the harm Instagram can cause teenagers — especially teen girls — when it comes to mental health and body image issues.

Meta has since added a host of safety features to Instagram, including separate accounts for teenagers with stronger protections around messaging and privacy, along with content restrictions.

But child-safety advocates and experts, along with some former Meta employees, have long contended that the features are little more than window dressing.

Arturo Béjar, a former Meta engineering director who testified last week in the Oakland trial, called the settlement a “significant milestone” but warned that it should not be interpreted as an “all clear” sign that Instagram is now safe for children.

“The agreement has a big problem in that it allows Meta to define harm,” Béjar said in an interview. He urged the court to address that “because it’s one thing to say, ‘Yeah, you only get like two hours of alcohol or two hours of cigarettes a day,’ but it’s still as bad for you because of what’s getting delivered.”

Parents and advocates celebrated the settlement as a moment of accountability for Meta. Victoria Hinks, mother of Alexandra “Owl” Hinks, who died by suicide at age 16, said she was satisfied with the terms “as long as they enforce it properly.”

“It felt like today finally something was done,” she said outside the Oakland courthouse. “I feel like justice is possible.”

MURDOCK, Neb. (AP) — In rural eastern Nebraska, a technology revolution could rise from fields of corn and soybean in the form of new data centers to power the artificial intelligence boom.

But just like around many parts of the country, opposition has been building in ways that defy typical partisan boundaries. Conservative farmers and the state Sierra Club chapter recently found common cause against labor leaders as they filled the firehouse in Murdock — population around 275 — to share concerns about data center development moving too quickly.

The scene exemplified an unlikely coalition that worries about dwindling farmland, declining water supplies and rising electricity bills — not to mention how massive corporations could reshape small town America into nodes in a national network of computing warehouses.

The debate around data center projects is one of the rare modern issues to cut across party lines, demographics and geography — from Republican-dominated Nebraska, Texas and Wyoming to swing-state Pennsylvania to Democratic-leaning New Mexico.

Supporters of data centers, including Republican President Donald Trump and some union leaders who usually back Democrats, praise a potential jobs and economic bonanza, while helping the U.S. thwart China in the geopolitical race for technological supremacy.

But hostility toward developments coming at breakneck speed has surged ahead of November’s midterm elections, and forced national, state and local elected officials to adapt to a shifting political landscape.

Judy Stroy, a fifth-generation Nebraska farmer whose late husband grew corn and soybeans and whose son still does, worried that with “the amount of ground that’s getting gobbled up every year, our food source is in trouble.”

“That should scare everyone,” she said.

Some areas have paused data center expansion

Stroy’s fields are just outside Murdock, a village named for a railroad official at the company that first laid tracks here in the 1890s. There’s a school, a post office, a bar and a Corn Grower’s State Bank branch, plus the Midwest Farmer’s Coop where growers sell their produce and buy supplies like feed and fertilizer.

Murdock is in Cass County, where officials recently approved a 12-month moratorium on allowing data center development.

That might freeze energy company Tenaska’s plans to potentially option 1,300-plus acres of land along Highway 75, south of the nearby villages of Murray and Beaver Lake, in a project that activists fear would pave the way for a data center and its own natural gas power plant.

Tenaska spokesperson Leighton Elise Eusebio said the company has been exploring “the feasibility of developing power generation to serve large loads, whether that is a data center or other form of economic development.”

“We believe there are opportunities to work with public power, communities and other stakeholders to develop power generation that will benefit Nebraskans,” Eusebio said in a statement.

Meanwhile, data center operator CyrusOne has nearly 400 acres under its control outside another Cass County community, Plattsmouth, also along Highway 75, but no development has occurred nor has a project been announced, according to a CyrusOne spokesperson.

The area may be seen as particularly favorable because the highway has been widened, offering easy access to Omaha to the northeast, and to the college town of Lincoln to the southwest. The Missouri River provides a reasonably close, major water source.

Some landowners accepted large checks to sell. Local land typically can go for $10,000 an acre, residents say, and developers sometimes offer four times that, or even more.

Such paydays can be extra enticing as farming has gotten more expensive amid rising diesel prices and soybean exports that have declined in the midst of Trump’s tariff fight with a major market for the crop, China.

“What if somebody offered me $40,000 an acre for my ground? It would be hard to turn down,” Stroy conceded.

Nebraska Sierra Club attorney Ken Winston noted that tech giants have made donations to municipal programs in Lincoln to help mitigate the impact of data centers.

“We need to be aware of the fact that they’re going to happen somewhere,” Winston said. “But communities need to be able to protect themselves and if they don’t want them, they should be able to say no.”

Major project sparks New Mexico divisions

There is no development moratorium in New Mexico that could stop Project Jupiter, a $165 billion data center complex planned near the Mexican border, but concerns over dwindling water supplies are mounting.

“It is not about blue vs. red, or whether we’re a purple state or county,” said Samantha Barncastle Salopek, a longtime water attorney, who is running as a Republican for a seat on the Doña Ana County Commission partly because of the project.

“This is about the local community coming together and saying, ‘Hold on, hold on.’ We didn’t get enough information, and now we’re very concerned because also we have to cut back our water use anyway,” she said.

Barncastle Salopek, whose family grows pecans, said she frequently fields worried calls from farmers, ranchers and local business owners across the political spectrum and in other states.

“When we have to fight over the last piece of the pie, those big companies are going to win,” she said of pressure on remaining water supplies. That’s because New Mexico has been hammered by persistent drought, and large swaths of the Rio Grande have dried up in the central part of the state.

The largest reservoir stands at 1.3% capacity, lows unseen since the early 1970s, even though New Mexico is on the hook to deliver more water to Texas under a recent settlement approved by the U.S. Supreme Court. Activists worry that New Mexico’s pecan, chile and other farms could disappear, taking schools, hospitals and supporting businesses and incomes with them.

Oracle, which announced Project Jupiter, has offered funding for youth programs and pledged to invest $50 million in water and wastewater systems in Doña Ana County.

It also plans to partner with an agriculture technology company to install sensors providing real-time data to farmers to help them use water more efficiently — estimating an eventual savings of 21 million gallons annually.

An Oracle spokesperson called the project a generational New Mexico investment, saying it would generate $4.7 billion in taxes and create more than 7,000 construction jobs and 1,500 long-term jobs while being designed to use little water over 15 years, given its closed-loop cooling and fuel-cell systems.

Still, the Center for Biological Diversity last week filed an emergency petition with the New Mexico Supreme Court, challenging the state’s approval of well drilling to supply millions of gallons of water for Project Jupiter’s construction.

The court on Sunday granted that request, halting authorization to use water from a new well until the legal fight is concluded.

During a recent protest in the state capital of Santa Fe, the demonstrators included Jesus Rodriguez, who traveled four-plus hours from his micro-farm in southern New Mexico.

“The fact is that now the money has taken over,” said Rodriguez, who described himself as disillusioned with American politics. “Now it shows that the Democrats, Republicans, or whatever other party is involved, they don’t care about the land. They care about money. And that’s because they want power.”

Some labor leaders see new job opportunities

Data centers have found an ally in organized labor, including Mike Gage, president and secretary-treasurer of the Nebraska State AFL-CIO. Gage said he personally was worried that some workers are seeing their jobs replaced by AI, but that the centers can also create construction jobs and longer-term positions for people running the finished product.

“This problem is also a very big opportunity for some small communities,” Gage said. He noted that a data center built decades ago in Council Bluffs, Iowa, near Omaha, still employs about 60 people today.

Heather McKenzie, who works in labor relations in Lincoln, said putting more data centers in Nebraska can slow an exodus of skilled young people leaving the state.

“I don’t think that enough people understand that this is going to create really good jobs,” she said. “I think a lot of people view it in a negative sense because it’s being sprung on them.”

Chris Backemeyer, a Democratic congressional candidate in the district that includes Murdock, is a former State Department employee. He said he heard about Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates offering to host data centers for the U.S., which might concentrate technology outside the country.

“That scares the bejesus out of me,” Backemeyer said.

Trump champions data centers, but some Republicans are wary

The president has warned about China’s technology gains and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said that a federal pause on data center construction might be a “dangerous prospect.”

Still, most registered voters oppose building a data center in their area, according to a July Fox News poll, including 60% of Republicans and 53% of MAGA voters.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul ordered a one-year ban on large data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a fellow Democrat, said his administration would no longer prioritize data center projects when it comes to issuing construction permits or granting developers lucrative tax exemptions if they don’t meet certain standards.

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced a halt on approval of new data centers until audits determine their impact on the state’s electrical grid.

Abbott told ABC News that data centers hadn’t been working in collaboration with state or local officials and “basically dug their own grave for the problem that’s been caused for them, and that’s why they got the backlash they deserve.”

The Republican Party’s Senate campaign arm is worried enough about the issue potentially deciding races in Ohio, that it drafted a memo outlining how to respond. But politicians on both sides of the aisle have turned data centers into a punching bag.

Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican running for an open House seat, has pledged to halt their construction.

“If Silicon Valley wants to build their liberal empire, they can do it somewhere else,” he said in an ad.

That overlaps with an ad for the mayor of Scranton, Pennsylvania, Democrat Paige Cognetti, who said “we are not for sale” when it comes to data centers. Cognetti is trying to unseat first-term Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan in a battleground district.

Trump is undeterred, saying that what data centers mean “for a community is jobs and lots of money and lower taxes.” The president has also conceded, however, that tech companies and developers maybe “can use a little public relations help.”

Seeking to soften fears about rising utility prices, Trump says his administration has urged data centers to build their own power plants.

Yet, during a recent meeting in the conservative East Texas town of Tyler, residents complained of being forced to live in a “gas cloud” so data centers can get enough electricity.

The complaint echoed a similar objection from Kardal Coleman, who leads the Democratic Party in big-city Dallas County. He wrote a recent email decrying data centers for “replacing our jobs, polluting our air, and exacerbating the climate crisis, not to mention the noise disturbing our neighborhoods.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. reopened a border crossing in Arizona to cattle from Mexico on Monday as part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to reduce record-high beef prices, though economists doubt the move will mean much to grocery store shoppers.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has said concerns about the New World screwworm’s spread lessened enough to allow the movement of cattle from Mexico at a crossing in Douglas, Arizona, about 230 miles (370 kilometers) southeast of Phoenix. Over time, it hopes to reopen other crossings in New Mexico and Texas.

“Today, the border in Sonora is open for livestock,” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a Monday morning news conference in Mexico City, referring to the Mexican state bordering Arizona.

Cattle were coming across the border by mid-afternoon Monday.

Beef prices clearly are a concern for President Donald Trump, who announced Friday that he would allow up to 331,000 tons (300,000 metric tons) of imported ground beef into the U.S., tariff-free, to be sold at below-market prices over the next 90 days. In February, the White House said closing the border to livestock imports from Mexico more than a year ago was “essential” to containing the screwworm but it has exacerbated a shortage of cattle for slaughter in the U.S.

“The administration obviously has a lot of incentive to try to be able to say that they’re doing something about high beef prices in particular,” said Derrell Peel, a professor of agribusiness at Oklahoma State University. “Beef has been singled out because it is an expensive product and because it’s just high profile.”

The Trump administration closed the border to cattle imports in May 2025 as part of its response to the screwworm, a parasite with flesh-eating larvae that can infest and even kill cattle or other animals. The move came as the U.S. already was struggling to meet beef demand, thanks to a cattle herd that has been shrinking for five years and now is the smallest in decades.

Because the USDA plans a phased reopening of the border, it will take months for Mexican imports to return to their traditional levels, Peel said. Mexico has traditionally provided 1.1 million head, or about 3% of the U.S. cattle supply.

“I don’t expect to see any measurable impact on cattle prices or beef prices soon,” Peel said.

The smallest US herd in decades fueled record prices

The USDA reported that on Jan. 1, the U.S. cattle herd had dropped to 86.2 million head, the lowest figure in 75 years. Beef prices skyrocketed over the past five years, rising significantly faster than food prices as a whole, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The average price of a pound (453 grams) of ground beef rose nearly 57% from July 2021 to July 2026, from $4.39 to $6.89 — hitting a peak of $6.90 in May — with a 10% increase over the previous year. Food prices have risen about 25% overall in those five years, according to the bureau’s numbers.

The price for a pound of uncooked steak rose 35% over the past five years, reaching a record $13.06 per pound in July, also 10% higher than a year before.

But Glynn Tonsor, a professor of agricultural economics at Kansas State University, said the potential effect on beef prices from the smaller supply of cattle was lessened because the U.S. beef industry is more efficient and has been able to get more meat from each animal than in past years.

The USDA says the reopening starts at a safe spot

U.S. government and industry officials view the New World screwworm fly as a major threat to the nation’s $113 billion cattle industry. It was an annual warm-weather scourge for U.S. ranchers from at least the 1930s through the 1960s, until the U.S. largely eradicated it. The fly was contained for years near the Panama Canal, but returned to southern Mexico in late 2024 and advanced toward the U.S., with the first case in Texas since 1966 reported June 3.

Since then, more than 40 cases have been confirmed in southern Texas and southeastern New Mexico, with infestations of cattle, sheep, goats and dogs.

In her July announcement of plans for a phased reopening of the border, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said it was possible to start with an Arizona crossing because the northern Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua had stronger animal health programs than other parts of Mexico. She also said each animal would be inspected and declared free of the parasite before crossing the border.

U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee Chair John Boozman said the USDA is taking a “careful, science-based” approach to reopening the border and imposing strong animal health protocols.

“This is an important step for America’s cattle producers, especially our feeders in the border states,” Boozman, an Arkansas Republican, said in a statement. “Restoring this long-standing trade is critical to strengthening our cattle supply and supporting a healthy, competitive beef industry.”

Drought, low prices led to the smallest US herd in 75 years

Drought in cattle-producing regions of the U.S. is a major reason the national herd is so small, said David Anderson, professor of agricultural economics at Texas A&M University. If grass doesn’t grow, cattle have nothing to graze upon, forcing ranchers to sell them off. Low cattle prices over the past two decades also are a factor.

“Where we are today is sort of the culmination of some 18, 19, 20 years of very low cattle prices,” he said. “That forces us to reduce our herds. Drought forces us to reduce them even further.”

The shortage of cattle also has left beef processing plants operating below capacity.

Tyson Foods, one of the nation’s largest meat processors, announced in November that it was reorganizing its beef operations and closing a plant in Lexington, Nebraska, about 220 miles (354 kilometers) southwest of Omaha. Earlier this month, it announced plans to close a plant in Utah outside Salt Lake City and another in Illinois about 150 miles (241 kilometers) southeast of Chicago.

In June, another major U.S. processor, JBS USA, announced plans to close beef plants in Memphis and outside Philadelphia, though it later said it would keep some operations at the Pennsylvania plant to preserve 400 jobs there.

Rebuilding the U.S. herd — and ultimately lowering prices — likely will take years, largely because a cow typically has only one calf a year, Peel said. In addition, breeding a heifer keeps her out of the food supply, tightening it further as the herd is rebuilt.

Peel said prices will remain high for some time and for elected officials, “There’s nothing you can do.”