Meta ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in New Mexico child-safety case

Meta ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in New Mexico child-safety case

A Santa Fe judge has hit Meta with one of the largest child-safety penalties ever levied against a tech company, capping a closely watched trial over harms to teenagers on Facebook and Instagram. Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay a total of $942 million, ruling the company created a "public nuisance" and was a significant contributor to New Mexico's teen mental health crisis. That figure combines a new $567 million abatement fund with the $375 million in civil penalties a jury had already assessed in March. ForbesTechCrunch

The judge's language was pointed. Biedscheid compared Meta's platforms to factories, likening its advertising and content to a factory's products and the psychological harm and sexual exploitation occurring on the apps to pollution the factory emits. Of the abatement fund, $420 million is earmarked specifically for treatment services aimed at young people. The court also ordered concrete operational changes: Meta must remove visible "like" counts for minors unless a parent approves showing them, pause push notifications to underage users between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and cap their platform use at roughly 90 hours a month — about three hours a day. Engadget + 2

On the thorny issue of age verification, the court acknowledged federal children's privacy law limits how Meta can verify ages for children under 13, so it instead ordered the company to improve AI-based age-estimation tools and build a dedicated model for identifying under-13 users within two years, plus a portal for schools to report suspected underage accounts. Meta plans to fight the ruling: a company spokesperson said, "We disagree with the ruling and will appeal." The case, brought by New Mexico's attorney general, follows a separate Los Angeles court loss in March over addictive design patterns and comes as Meta faces a consolidated lawsuit from 33 states in California federal court, plus additional suits from states including Tennessee. Legal observers have compared the wave of litigation to the tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s. Quartz + 2