A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund addressing harm the company's platforms caused to children, in what state officials are calling the largest child-safety ruling ever levied against a social media company. First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid found that Meta's Facebook and Instagram products constituted a "public nuisance" and that the company had failed to adequately warn the public about risks the platforms posed to minors.
The $567 million breaks down into $420 million earmarked for treatment and clinical behavioral-health services for young people harmed by the platforms, and $147 million for prevention, screening and awareness programs, to be spent over five years. Combined with a $375 million jury verdict reached in March in an earlier phase of the same case, Meta's total liability in New Mexico now stands at $942 million.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the ruling followed findings that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and, in the March phase of the case, concealed internal knowledge about child sexual exploitation occurring on its platforms.
Today's decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online.
Raúl Torrez, New Mexico Attorney General
Court-ordered changes to the platforms
Beyond the payout, Judge Biedscheid's order requires Meta to build new safeguards for underage users. The company must roll out AI-based "age assurance" tools that use signals such as friend networks and content-consumption patterns to estimate a user's age, develop a model within two years specifically aimed at predicting whether an account belongs to someone under 13, and request identity verification when that model flags a likely underage user. Meta must also delete personal data it has collected on confirmed under-13 users, add educational safety banners across its apps, and report on its compliance twice a year. Earlier findings in the case also pointed to restrictions on adult-to-minor messaging and nighttime notifications for teen accounts.
Meta said it disagrees with the ruling and intends to appeal. "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," the company said in a statement, without directly addressing the judge's public-nuisance finding.
The New Mexico case is one of several running in parallel against Meta over alleged harm to young users, including a 33-state consolidated federal lawsuit pending in Oakland, California, and a separate case decided in Los Angeles earlier this year that reached similar conclusions about addictive design features. Torrez has said he hopes the ruling spurs federal lawmakers to update child-safety statutes that predate the smartphone era, arguing that state courts are being asked to fill a regulatory gap Congress has left open.
Meta's appeal is expected to take months to resolve, and the company's broader legal exposure on youth-safety claims remains open across the other pending cases. For now, the New Mexico judgment stands as the largest single child-safety penalty a court has imposed on a major social platform, a marker plaintiffs' attorneys in the other pending cases are likely to cite as they press their own claims.
