Alabama Settles With TikTok for Up to $300 Million. Here Is What the Agreement Requires.

Alabama has reached a settlement with TikTok, resolving a lawsuit filed in April 2025 by Alabama AG Steve Marshall. The agreement guarantees Alabama a minimum of $116.2 million, due within 45 days, with the potential to reach $300 million depending on how many other state Attorneys General enter qualifying settlements with TikTok.

The settlement was reached the week the case was scheduled to go to trial. Alabama would have been the first state to bring its claims against TikTok to trial.

What the lawsuit alleged

The April 2025 complaint accused TikTok of designing its platform with addictive features, knowingly exposing young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misleading the public about the safety of its platforms for children and teenagers.

What TikTok must now implement

The settlement imposes a series of specific design requirements on TikTok for teen users.

A two-hour daily time limit applies by default, with parental controls that allow parents to reduce it further. Productive pauses interrupt teen users after 15 minutes of continuous use and again at 60 and 90 minutes, designed to limit endless scrolling. Nighttime access is restricted from midnight to 6am, with additional restrictions on messaging and push notifications overnight and during school hours.

TikTok must implement stronger age assurance measures to more effectively verify the age of young users within one year. Teen accounts must have stronger content moderation protections, including limits on their discoverability by adults and parental notification of suspicious interactions between teen users and adults. Cosmetic filters are prohibited for teen users by default. Teen users must be given a default non-personalised feed.

The settlement structure

Of the $116.2 million guaranteed amount, $100 million goes to the Alabama AG Office and the state, $14.2 million covers attorneys' fees, and $2 million covers litigation costs.

The remaining $183.8 million is contingent on other state Attorneys General entering qualifying settlements with TikTok. It vests in four tranches of $55.14 million, $55.14 million, $36.76 million, and $36.76 million as 10, 20, 30, and 40 other state AGs respectively settle, each with a 24-month vesting window. Once a tranche vests, TikTok pays it in 10 annual instalments, meaning the full $300 million could take many years to reach Alabama.

The Meta settlement as context

One month before the Alabama settlement, Meta agreed to a $17.1 billion multistate settlement with 52 state and territorial Attorneys General. The design requirements imposed on Meta are nearly identical to those now required of TikTok: a default two-hour daily time limit, nighttime restrictions from midnight to 6am, prompts after 15 minutes of continuous use and at 60 and 90 minutes, stronger age assurance measures, parental controls, restrictions on cosmetic filters, and the ability for teens to use a non-personalised feed.

Meta explicitly called on TikTok and YouTube to adopt the same protections following its own settlement, arguing that restrictions on one platform would be less effective if teenagers could simply move to another. The remaining roughly $5.3 billion of Meta's settlement is contingent on both TikTok and YouTube implementing a one-hour daily limit, Night Mode, and age assurance measures, and each making a matching payment.

The Alabama settlement was reached one month after Meta's, and the design requirements in both are nearly identical.

Link to source: https://cybernews.com/tech/tiktok-alabama-settlement-addictive-design/

Fairpatterns detects the addictive design mechanics these settlements are designed to address, automatically, across platforms and at scale.