In a landmark ruling that marks the largest child safety-related penalty against a major social media platform in U.S. history, a New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay an additional $567 million in damages, bringing the total penalties against the company in the state’s lawsuit to $942 million. The ruling also for the first time ever classifies a major social media company as a public nuisance over its harms to child wellbeing.
Presiding Judge Bryan Biedscheid drew a striking parallel between Meta’s operations and polluting industry in his Thursday ruling, framing the company’s algorithmically driven platforms as factories that push harmful content as an unavoidable byproduct of their core advertising business. “Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms,” Biedscheid wrote. “Instead, they migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world and create a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families and schools, as well as hospitals and law enforcement.”
The $567 million penalty will be placed into a court-supervised fund designed to abate ongoing harms from Meta’s platforms, with the vast majority of the funding — $420 million — earmarked for clinical and behavioral health treatment for children and adolescents who have already experienced harm from the platform. The remaining funds will go toward awareness and prevention training for educators, healthcare providers and other adults who interact with at-risk young people.
Beyond financial penalties, the ruling imposes sweeping mandatory safeguards on Meta for all underage users on its platforms, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. The new requirements include: prohibiting adults from being matched with underage users via the platform’s recommendation algorithms and blocking unsolicited direct messages from adults to minors; banning minors from sharing or receiving nude or sexually explicit content; implementing a one-strike ban for adult users found engaging in child sexual exploitation; removing public “like” counts for all accounts belonging to users under 18; restricting push notifications for minors to between 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. daily, with additional restrictions during school hours on weekdays; and capping total monthly usage for underage users at 90 hours, equal to roughly three hours per day across Meta’s Facebook and Instagram platforms.
This ruling is the second phase of a 2023 lawsuit brought by New Mexico’s state attorney general, which alleged that Meta intentionally designed its platforms to prioritize engagement over child safety, leading its recommendation algorithms to steer young users toward sexually explicit content, dangerous contact with sexual predators, and other harmful material. In the first phase of the trial, the court already found Meta guilty of repeatedly violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and ordered an initial $375 million in penalties, which Meta already announced it would appeal.
Meta has repeatedly pushed back against the ruling, maintaining that it has implemented robust safety measures for teen users and that the claims against the company misrepresent its practices. “We disagree with the ruling and will appeal,” a Meta spokesperson said Thursday. “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
The New Mexico ruling is just one of thousands of ongoing child safety lawsuits facing Meta across the United States. Earlier this year, the company already lost a similar child safety trial in Los Angeles, and next week a high-profile trial backed by 36 U.S. states will begin in California, where state attorneys general will argue Meta violated federal child privacy laws through its harmful design choices targeting young users.