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A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a youth mental health fund and overhaul how Facebook and Instagram work for minors after finding the company created a public nuisance in the state.
Getting into it: The ruling from First Judicial District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid caps a two-phase trial and stacks on top of the $375 million a jury ordered in March after finding 75,000 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. Meta’s total bill in the state now runs past $940 million.
Of the new money, $420 million goes to treatment services, with the rest split between prevention, screening, referrals, and oversight over five years. The operational changes are extensive. No account belonging to a user under 18 can be recommended to an adult, and no adult can message an underage user. Nudity sent or received by minors is banned.
A one-strike policy applies to adults engaging in child sexual exploitation. Like counts disappear for users under 18. Push notifications are banned from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during school hours on weekdays. And minors get a hard cap of 90 cumulative hours per month across Instagram and Facebook, roughly three hours a day.
Biedscheid leaned on an analogy Meta’s own lawyers introduced at trial. “The court considers Meta’s platforms to be analogous to the factory,” he wrote, “the advertising and other content displayed on those platforms to be what is produced by the factory, and the psychological harm to and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated.” He compared the harm to harmful pollution that does not stay contained but migrates into the real world, burdening families, schools, hospitals, and law enforcement.
The evidence included Meta’s own internal research. Testing the company ran in 2019 showed that when Instagram served up account suggestions to users it had already flagged as likely groomers, 26% of those suggestions were teenagers. An employee chat from 2020 pinned 80% of what Meta itself labeled “violating adult/minor connections” on one recommendation feature. Arturo Bejar, who ran engineering at Meta and later took a consulting role with Instagram’s Well-Being team, testified that the platform “is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.”
In a statement, a spokesman for Meta said they “disagree with the ruling and will appeal,” adding that the company remains “confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Attorney General Raúl Torrez called it “a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child.”
