Meta Ordered to Pay $567M in New Mexico Child Exploitation Lawsuit

A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay $567 million for failing to warn the public about the dangers its social media platforms posed to children. The judgment is in addition to the $375 million the Instagram and Facebook parent company was ordered to pay in March as part of the trial’s first phase.

In a ruling late Thursday, Judge Bryan Biedcheid wrote that New Mexico teens are in the midst of a mental health crisis and found that “Meta’s platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis.” The $567 million will fund awareness and prevention, screening and assessment, and referral programs, with the bulk — $420 million — going to treatment.

Biedscheid’s ruling called Facebook’s platforms a “public nuisance” and compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and other content displayed on the platforms as its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated.”

The court ordered Meta to implement private-by-default settings for users under 18 and limit Friends for users under the age of 18 to users who are also under 18. Also, accounts belonging to users under 18 shall not show up in search or appear in recommendations, according to the order.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said Thursday’s verdict is a victory for parents worried about the effects social media is having on their children.

“This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families, and making sure that one of the world’s largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence,” Torrez said in a statement.

Meta said in a statement that it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal it.

“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,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.

This isn’t the only legal scrutiny Meta has faced over how it handles underage users on its platform. In March, a California jury found both Instagram owner Meta and Google’s parent company Alphabet liable in a lawsuit brought by a 20-year-old woman who alleged that YouTube and Instagram were designed to be addictive to children.

Social media platforms have introduced specific settings and tools for their youngest users, such as Instagram’s teen accounts, but many of these were launched relatively recently, in just the past few years.