The Instagram logo is seen on a cell phone in Boston, Massachusetts, Oct. 14, 2022. File photo by Michael Dwyer/AP _Theo Wells-Spackman is a Report for America corps member who reports forVTDigger._ Vermont has secured $92.7 million and new limits on use for customers under 18 in a settlement with social media giant Meta, state Attorney General Charity Clark said in a press conference Wednesday morning. The sum is the largest single-company settlement in state history, Clark said, and marks a “watershed moment” for social media users across the country. The settlement, which could reach $18 billion nationwide, was negotiated in coordination with 51 other states and territories, Clark added. The same consumer protection measures were guaranteed to each party, she said. Clark sued Meta, which owns social media sites Facebook and Instagram, in 2023, alleging the company intentionally designed its products to cause compulsive use and lied to customers about its platforms’ safety. The suit cited research linking social media use to mental health issues, altered psychological development and eating disorders for teenagers — particularly young women. The terms announced Wednesday include major changes to how minors can use the company’s platforms, including a ban on nighttime use and a daily time limit of two hours, Clark said. Meta is also required to improve its age verification processes to keep kids under 13 from accessing its sites, and to introduce a “school mode” which limits notifications during the regular school day. “Our priority is to get the harm to stop,” Clark said Wednesday, calling the required changes “incredibly useful.” Meta is required to make some such changes within weeks, and will likely have several months to address the more technical parts of the deal, according to Assistant Attorney General Justin Kolber. “The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms,” said C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, in a statement Wednesday. “As a parent, I’m proud of both the work Meta has done to protect kids historically, and of this new groundbreaking agreement.” Meta’s lawyers had argued initially that Vermont had no ability to sue the company in Chittenden County Superior Court given the social media company’s limited physical presence in the state and the fact that its products are not aimed at Vermonters in particular. But the Vermont Supreme Court rejected that claim in strong terms last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to weigh in further on the matter earlier this summer. “Vermont played a very special role in the history of this case,” Clark said of the conflict over jurisdiction. Clark’s office is currently pursuing related claims against TikTok, Youtube and Snap Inc., the parent company of the platform Snapchat. The structure of Wednesday’s settlement guarantees further payments from Meta if certain terms are met in those negotiations, which could see Vermont’s total payout rise to $127 million, Clark said. _This story will be updated._ * * * ## Latest stories ## Vermont Progressive Party chair resigns after less than a year on the job by Shaun Robinson August 26, 2026, 11:53 amAugust 26, 2026, 11:55 am ## Vital Communities enters talks to save town listservs from shutdown by Valley News August 26, 2026, 5:53 am ## UVM president says school’s budget deficit is closed despite declining enrollment by Charlotte Oliver August 25, 2026, 5:43 pmAugust 25, 2026, 5:47 pm More coverage * * * **Share your Opinion** **Request a correction** **Submit a tip** * * *

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Gel is back! Now 10 years after our most recent event, Gel 2016, the event returns on October 2-3 with the theme: Rebirth.

_Commentaries are opinion pieces contributed by readers and newsmakers. VTDigger strives to publish a variety of views from a broad range of Vermonters. Commentaries give voice to community members and do not represent VTDigger’s views. To submit a commentary,follow the instructions here._ _This commentary is by Laura Derrendinger, who co-leads the_ _Vermont Coalition for Independence, Reconnection and Liberation_ _._ With the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding approaching, it is time to declare Vermont’s schools independent of so-called Big Tech. The online and digital product companies — Google and Apple chief among them — are this era’s mercenaries, hired to maximize profits by putting their products directly in front of a captive audience of schoolchildren. In March, a jury in California found Meta and Google, which owns YouTube, liable for harming children. An investigation in The New York Times exposed how both companies planned to capture students’ attention at school. Yet we’ve allowed Google’s products to become standard issue in nearly all Vermont schoolchildren’s hands. Google’s own internal documents show it deliberately places Chromebooks in schools to provide access to YouTube and build a customer base while children are young. Our children’s school environments have become commercialized for digital product makers at the expense of their health and education. Vermont students should be free from being targeted by marketing in the classroom. We support digital tools when independent research shows learning gains over nondigital alternatives. Most of what’s in Vermont classrooms today doesn’t meet that bar. This legislative session, the Vermont Coalition for Independence, Reconnection and Liberation advanced two policy priorities in Montpelier to limit Big Tech’s reach into classrooms. Students and teachers should have the right to opt out of using electronic devices in school, especially since we know online crimes against children occur on school-issued devices during the school day. Second, educational technology products purchased with our tax dollars need independent, transparent review for safety and efficacy. In pushing for that independent verification, testimony from the Agency of Education before the Vermont House Commerce Committee stated that “in the educational technology space, Common Sense Media and the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) are trusted sources of information.” ##### READ MORE ## Legislation would regulate what technology kids use for learning. Lawmakers and advocates say it’s overdue. by Corey McDonald April 26, 2026, 6:37 amApril 27, 2026, 12:36 pm ISTE and Common Sense Media have both received funding from and partnered with Meta and Google. Imagine if education leaders cited a group funded by McDonald’s and Coca-Cola as a trusted source for setting school lunch standards? It’s the same logic as expecting Marlboro to advise on tobacco safety, or Budweiser to teach kids about underage drinking — yet the American Academy of Pediatrics directs parents to Snapchat and Instagram for guidance on keeping kids safe on social media. When corporate interests develop relationships with trusted messengers, their recommendations will tend to serve the company’s interest in growing profits over student well-being. This is a recurring tactic across industries: catastrophic capture of the nonprofits that communities trust. Vermont is not alone in pushing back against Big Tech in schools. In this 2026 legislative session, 16 states introduced legislation to regulate or study the effects of educational technology on students. In response, Big Tech’s lobbyists have moved into statehouses nationwide. Product defense is a known tactic in many health-harming industries: sugar, tobacco, oil. It follows a consistent pattern: Delay and obscure to stall regulation. Our children and schools are now caught in the same playbook, at the expense of their health and education. We submit a simple request: Question everything. Legislators and school leaders: Ask every entity that comes to you with policy recommendations to disclose how they are funded and who they partner with. If someone cites a source, check where its funding comes from. Nonprofits and government institutions must divorce from corporate funding and influence that creates real or perceived bias in recommendations they give. No single policy tool will solve this problem; it will take many levers at once. But it starts with refusing to let the king’s mercenaries write the rules meant to protect the people they’re paid to capture. * * * ## Latest Opinion posts ## Patriotism is not a dirty word Inflation, unrest, distrust in government — 1976 had all of it too, and Americans still found reasons for pride. June 24, 2026, 5:10 pmJune 24, 2026, 5:10 pm ## Calling nuclear power clean doesn’t make it true Vermont can change the definition of clean energy. It can’t change what nuclear power actually is. June 23, 2026, 5:18 pmJune 23, 2026, 5:18 pm ## Vermont needs better housing, not just more of it New developments are scarring the landscape and shortchanging Vermonters on design, location and affordability. June 23, 2026, 2:40 pmJune 23, 2026, 2:40 pm All Opinion * * * Have something to say? Submit a commentary here. * * * **Share your Opinion** **Request a correction** **Submit a tip** * * *

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OR: The Great Switcheroo

_Letters to the editor are brief reader responses to stories and opinion pieces published by VTDigger. Letters give voice to community members and do not represent VTDigger’s views. To submit a letter,follow the instructions here._ Dear Editor, As a reading interventionist at a Vermont public middle school, I witness daily how technology shapes our students’ futures. We use Google Chromebooks for statewide testing, diagnostic testing and even for daily instruction. As a Vermont teacher, I am expected to have all my work available through the web-based learning management system, Google Classroom, to regularly check my Gmail and to use only Google tools in my job. Generally, this helps Vermont schools move toward Universal Design for Learning, an educational framework designed to improve and optimize teaching and learning. Unfortunately, the Google spell-check feature no longer works effectively on student Chromebooks. Rather than helping students fix their spelling, Google’s artificial intelligence is constantly offering to rewrite the sentence or find links to related information. Google places so much emphasis on developing all the flashy AI features that it no longer cares about perfecting simple, essential tools like spell-check. For me, this issue is deeply personal. As a dyslexic person, spell-check has been the crucial tool that allowed me to participate in the information economy. In my role as a reading teacher, I find it vital to teach students how to integrate spell-check into their writing process as an essential accommodation. By failing to fix this basic feature, we are depriving an entire generation of their potential for independence. Vermont schools spend millions of dollars a year on Google Chromebooks and their software licenses. Because of these massive investments, Vermont teachers and students are trapped in the Google environment with no viable alternatives. The state must now take a stand and stop sending any money to Google until it fixes the issues with spell-check in the Chrome environment. I appreciate Vermont’s wish to embrace equitable access and the effort to get all Vermont students onto computers. However, it seems like an incredible waste of time and money if we can’t even expect basic tools that actually work. Ben Mitchell Westminster West, Vt. * * * ## Latest Opinion posts ## Vermont is talking. Is Montpelier listening? Vermont is losing people, jobs and young talent at a rate that should alarm anyone paying attention. This session proved the Legislature can act — when it chooses to. June 9, 2026, 1:58 pmJune 9, 2026, 1:58 pm ## The state can’t fix Vermont’s hospitals by telling them what to do Real transformation requires getting prices right, then letting hospitals respond. June 8, 2026, 5:47 pmJune 8, 2026, 5:47 pm ## Spent fuel is the nuclear elephant in the room Nuclear advocates refuse to address what to do with the spent fuel already sitting on the banks of the Connecticut River. June 8, 2026, 1:18 pmJune 8, 2026, 1:18 pm All Opinion * * * Have something to say? Submit a letter to the editor here. * * * **Vermont's newsletter** **Request a correction** **Submit a tip** * * *

I have always wanted to own a Montblanc Writers Edition dedicated to Carlo Collodi, the Italian author whose real name was Carlo Lorenzini. He took his pen name from the Tuscan village where his mo…

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The first generation to truly grow up online, Generation Z and their cohort live in a social media ecosystem that blends facts and feelings. It’s significantly shifting how they understand what’s true...

_Commentaries are opinion pieces contributed by readers and newsmakers. VTDigger strives to publish a variety of views from a broad range of Vermonters. Commentaries give voice to community members and do not represent VTDigger’s views. To submit a commentary,follow the instructions here._ _This commentary is by Jessamyn West, who is a library technologist at Kimball Public Library in Randolph. She has taught a workshop on practical internet privacy for the past 10 years._ As a strong supporter of increased privacy protections for all technology users and a library professional, I believe S.71, a bill currently before the Legislature that would establish baseline data privacy rights for Vermonters and put limits on how businesses collect, use and sell personal data, will help. Here is why. I come from a library background; libraries are also strong advocates for patron privacy. We do this through patron education and data minimization, keeping information only as long as we need it for our work. After that, we don’t keep that data. We don’t need it. Patrons can choose to store this information, but the default setting is privacy. Legislation has helped libraries tremendously, including Act 150, which increased patron privacy. S.71 will help Vermont help people keep their personal data more secure and less likely to be lent, sold or otherwise transferred. These are people who, I assure you, have no idea how much information is being collected about them. Data minimization also protects users in the event of a data breach. I was one of the few people who sued Equifax after its massive data breach in 2017, a big deal at the time and now sadly almost normal. And I won. My library work involves helping technology users do basic things like setting up an email account, accessing their healthcare portal, downloading and signing up for apps, and managing their passwords and cloud storage. I help people sign up for and log in to a lot of things. The level of anti-privacy coercion that I see in my regular workday is shocking. Every app wants access to your contacts, your location, your birthday, your phone number and your address — meaning ads and other trackers can follow you around the internet and into your home. People do not understand that they can sometimes say no to giving businesses information like this. Data collectors would like them not to know this. Deceptive patterns built into software designs mean that the way to say no to an app’s request for your personal details is often smaller and harder to see than the one where you give up your personal data, especially for those with poor eyesight. I have a patron who comes in for help using YouTube, which is owned by Google. She uses it to listen to music or to play music for yoga classes she teaches. What she doesn’t realize is that Google also owns Nest, Fitbit, Waze and Google Docs. With default settings, Google tracks every video you’ve watched, how much of it you watched, where you were when you watched it, what device you watched it on and what you watched next. Combine that with your workout paths, driving directions, thermostat settings and the documents you work on, and you have a fairly complete picture of where you live, where you go, how you spend your time — even how warm you like your living room. ##### READ MORE ## Lawmakers race to finish data privacy bill amid outcry from businesses and medical providers by Theo Wells-Spackman May 1, 2026, 6:05 pmMay 1, 2026, 6:05 pm People in the library make jokes about how they talked about a thing and then saw an ad for that thing, but honestly, they have no idea how that all works. My patron does not know any of this. She does not change the default settings on her software. She does not know how to. The defaults are all set for maximum data collection for all but the most privacy-forward companies. The privacy settings are often hidden layers deep in menus, which can be hard for people to access — if they even know they exist — especially for people with poor motor skills. You shouldn’t need really good eyesight or steady hands to be able to keep your personal information private. One role of government is to protect people who are not privacy warriors from having their consent violated and their personal information collected, aggregated and shared. Businesses should not have been violating privacy like this in the first place. Telling them to dial it back should be the least that legislators can do. This is not just about Vermont. In this age of extreme concern that private data is being used by public and private entities to do things like put people in private prisons, disenfranchise people of color or control women’s access to healthcare and their own reproductive rights, this is the minimum we can do to preserve people’s civil liberties. It draws a line in the sand and makes a clear statement: Privacy is important and Vermont cares about it. * * * ## Latest Opinion posts ## Vermont lawmakers are being asked to gamble with patients’ vision A proposed expansion of optometrists’ surgical scope threatens to trade patient safety for access that may never materialize. May 8, 2026, 2:03 pmMay 8, 2026, 2:03 pm ## When veterans fear asking for help, everyone loses If seeking help in a mental health crisis can lead to domestic terrorism charges, veterans may choose to suffer alone instead. May 7, 2026, 4:55 pmMay 7, 2026, 4:55 pm ## Vermont’s loggers are struggling. A sales tax exemption could help. Vermont’s logging and forest trucking sector generates $140 million and supports 1,300 jobs. But the industry is on the edge, and the Legislature has only a small window to act. May 7, 2026, 3:26 pmMay 7, 2026, 3:26 pm All Opinion * * * Have something to say? 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