Louisiana Is Getting $180M From Meta. Here’s Where Officials Say It’s Headed.
BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana is set to collect more than $180 million from a nationwide settlement with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, over claims the platforms were built to hook children.
Attorney General Liz Murrill announced the deal Wednesday, but the state hasn’t laid out a formal spending plan for how the money gets used over the next nine years.
What Murrill Says the Money Is Earmarked For
Murrill has pointed to three broad categories for Louisiana’s share: enforcement, education and outreach, and mental health treatment and research tied to youth social media use. She’s also been upfront that the term covering all three, “remediation,” gives her office plenty of room to work with.
“The money is primarily intended to be used for remediation, and that’s a pretty broad term,” Murrill said. “I believe that the money should be used, first of all, for enforcement.”
She has said the state will have wide latitude in deciding exactly how the remediation dollars are spent, without committing to specific dollar splits between the three categories.
A Fusion Center and a Growing Tip Backlog
One idea Murrill has floated is a “fusion center” to pool law enforcement resources statewide around online child predator cases, an option she raised while discussing the settlement with KLFY. Her office credits its Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force with more than 1,300 predator arrests in recent years, and says the state is on pace for roughly 90,000 tips from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children this year alone, a number she says has tripled over the past few years.
Murrill has not said how much of the settlement, if any, would be committed to building that center.
How Much More Could Be Coming
The $180 million figure is a guaranteed minimum, and it could climb. Louisiana’s confirmed share sits at $180,878,138 of the current $12.19 billion multistate settlement. Another roughly $67 million would open up if Snap, TikTok and YouTube agree to comparable safety and payment terms, pushing the national total to $17.1 billion.
Louisiana is also due a separate $7.6 million tied to Meta’s sharing of Facebook users’ nonpublic data with third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, ahead of the 2016 election.
None of those additional dollars carry a spending plan yet either.
Louisiana’s Opioid Settlement Offers a Preview of the Accountability Questions Ahead
Louisiana has been down this road before with a much larger pot of settlement money. The state expects roughly $600 million from opioid manufacturers and distributors by 2038, funneled mostly to parishes and sheriffs rather than held at the state level. A May 2025 report from the Louisiana Legislative Auditor found no entity had been specifically tasked with enforcing how that money gets spent, and that only about $8.6 million of the $98.5 million distributed by that point could be confirmed as actually spent by the local governments surveyed.
That gap prompted two Lafayette-area legislators, Rep. Annie Spell and Sen. Brach Myers, to push for a statewide audit of the opioid funds this year, seeking an itemized accounting of how every parish and sheriff’s office has used the money. Their resolution asks for that report by the end of 2026.
No source has described a parish-level distribution plan for the Meta settlement the way the opioid deal has one; Murrill’s office handled the litigation in-house, and the money is expected to stay under the Attorney General’s control rather than get divided among local governments. But the same basic question applies once the state has broad discretion over how “remediation” gets defined: someone still has to track how it’s actually spent, and that’s a separate process from announcing the settlement.
What Happens Next
The Meta settlement still needs approval from U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in California before any of it is final. Murrill’s office has said it expects the first payment, roughly $17 million, within the settlement’s early stages, but has not released a timeline for when Louisiana lawmakers or the public might see a detailed breakdown of how that first installment gets spent.
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Gallery Credit: Joe Cunningham
