TikTok agrees $100m Alabama deal with two-hour limit for children

What happened

Children using TikTok in Alabama face a two-hour daily limit under a settlement requiring the company and its parent, ByteDance, to pay the US state $100m (£75.45m). The agreement also places restrictions on overnight use and introduces further controls over how young people encounter content and interact with adults.

The deal, reached on Friday, removes the need for a jury trial that was due to start on Monday. It is TikTok’s first settlement with a US state and resolves Alabama’s legal challenge over the company’s treatment of young users and its descriptions of child protection features.

Alongside the daily cap, the agreement restricts access between midnight and 6am. Notifications will be suspended during school hours, addressing a separate way in which the app can draw children back to their accounts even when they are not actively browsing.

Other provisions cover both appearance-altering tools and content selection. Cosmetic filters will be prohibited for children, while young users will be offered a feed that is not personalised. That gives them an alternative to viewing material selected through personalisation.

Parents will receive additional powers to manage their children’s activity. TikTok must also make children’s accounts harder for adults to discover and alert parents to suspicious contact between adult and teenage users. These measures extend the settlement beyond screen time to account visibility and communication.

The geographic scope is limited to Alabama. The agreement does not extend these requirements to TikTok users across the United States or introduce the same restrictions for families in the UK.

The background

Alabama began proceedings against TikTok and ByteDance in April 2025. Its original allegations centred on the claim that the app had been deliberately built to encourage compulsive use among children, drawing a comparison between its design and the mechanisms used in gambling machines.

The state subsequently reduced the scope of its case to allegations under Alabama’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. That shifted the legal focus towards what TikTok told families about its safeguards, rather than leaving the trial to address every aspect of the original addiction allegations.

Two features, Restricted Mode and Kids Mode, were central to that dispute. Alabama challenged the company’s descriptions of their effectiveness, alleging that parents had been misled about the protection those tools provided against harmful material.

The lawsuit also alleged that TikTok overstated its ability to keep sexual and violent content away from young users in order to secure teen-suitable ratings in app stores operated by Google, Apple and Microsoft. Those claims concerned the assurances presented around access to the app as well as activity inside it.

A further allegation concerned representations about the Chinese government’s access to American users’ data. TikTok defended its approach to children’s safety and invoked section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act, which provides online platforms with protection from liability for content supplied by users.

TikTok’s corporate structure has also changed during the year. A new investor group took control of its US operations, while the rest of the business continues to operate from China. ByteDance retains a minority stake in the American joint venture and was included in Friday’s agreement.

The wider legal cases

The Alabama terms draw on an agreement reached in August between Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and 52 state attorneys general. Meta agreed to pay $18bn to resolve state litigation alleging that its platforms had been designed to make children addicted.

Other cases against Meta had already produced jury decisions. In March, a New Mexico jury ordered the company to pay $375m after finding that it had misled the public about how safe its services were for children.

That month, a separate Los Angeles jury found Meta and Google’s YouTube negligent in a case brought by a 20-year-old woman who said she had developed a dependence on social media during childhood. The jury awarded her $6m.

TikTok has previously resolved cases before they reached trial, including litigation brought by a young woman in Los Angeles and by a Kentucky school district. A trial in Alabama would have opened its safety practices to further public examination, potentially including internal company documents and testimony from executives.

What people are saying

Alabama attorney general Steve Marshall welcomed the agreement as a significant benefit for parents. He presented the restrictions as practical protection against social media addiction, emphasising the reassurance he believed the settlement would give families concerned about their children’s use of the app.

Katherine Robertson, chief counsel in the attorney general’s office, said mediation had continued as the trial approached. She said TikTok accepted the state’s final offer and described the outcome as requiring substantial changes to policies Alabama had identified as harmful to children.

TikTok’s USDS spokesperson emphasised the company’s existing commitment to a safe environment for creativity, discovery and community. The company characterised the agreement as a further development of its teenage safety tools, maintaining its position that protecting young users was already a central objective.

What happens next

The first financial deadline is within 45 days, when the $100m payment must reach Alabama. The settlement also contains provisions under which the total paid to the state could reach $300m, including a condition involving similar agreements with 40 other attorneys general within a specified period.

Implementation is divided between immediate restrictions and longer-term technical work. The daily time limits and usage blocks are due to take effect immediately, while TikTok has up to a year to introduce other elements, including measures to verify users’ ages.

A longer overnight restriction is conditional on action by competing services. If other platforms make the same commitment, TikTok’s shutdown period would expand to run from 10pm to 7am. Meta accepted an equivalent condition in its own settlement, linking that part of the arrangements to participation across platforms.

Legal proceedings elsewhere continue independently of Alabama’s agreement. More than a dozen states, among them California and New York, still have cases against TikTok. Friday’s settlement therefore ends one state’s dispute while leaving the company facing a wider set of challenges over its services for young people.

Why this matters

For UK parents, the distinction between an optional safety setting and a settlement requirement is important. Alabama has secured obligations governing access, content and contact with adults, rather than relying solely on families choosing existing controls. It is a concrete example of litigation being used to require changes to a social media service.

The case also highlights two different parts of online safety: how children use a platform and how accurately its protections are explained to families. Alabama’s narrowed consumer-protection case addressed the second issue, while the resulting settlement reaches into the first through enforceable changes to the service.