Reported by: Ijeoma G | Edited by: Oravbiere Osayomore Promise.
A New Mexico state court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta to pay $567 million to address the harms its platforms have caused to young people's mental health, marking the largest financial penalty ever imposed on the company in a child safety case. The ruling, delivered on Thursday, August 6, 2026, by Judge Bryan Biedscheid of the State District Court in Santa Fe, concluded the second phase of a landmark trial that has exposed the social media giant's alleged role in fuelling a youth mental health crisis and facilitating child sexual exploitation.
The judge ruled that Meta's platforms constitute a "public nuisance" under New Mexico law, comparing the company to a polluting factory that must pay to abate the harm it causes. "The psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated," Judge Biedscheid said, according to the BBC. The ruling requires Meta to pay $420 million of the total into a treatment services fund for young people over the next five years, with the remaining $147 million allocated to awareness and prevention programmes, screening services, and other related costs. The new penalty comes on top of the $375 million in civil penalties that a jury ordered Meta to pay in March 2026, bringing the company's total liability in the case to $942 million.
The case originated from a lawsuit filed by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, which alleged that Meta had created a "breeding ground" for child predators on Facebook and Instagram and had knowingly misled the public about the safety of its platforms for young users. In the first phase of the trial, a jury found Meta liable for violating the state's Unfair Practices Act by engaging in "unfair and deceptive" and "unconscionable" trade practices. The second phase, which was tried before the judge without a jury, focused on whether Meta's platforms constituted a public nuisance and what remedies should be imposed.
Beyond the monetary penalty, the court ordered Meta to implement sweeping changes to how its platforms operate for young users in New Mexico. These include requiring Meta to delete the accounts and all personal information of users under 13 years of age, turning off push notifications for users under 18 during school hours (8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays) and at night (10 p.m. to 7 a.m.), automatically setting teen accounts to private, and preventing New Mexico users from "engaging in romantic or sexualized interactions with Meta's artificial intelligence chatbots." The judge also ordered Meta to build banner and informational screens to clearly explain its protection features and tools, and to display them regularly. Additionally, Meta must continue to improve its age assurance tools, including using artificial intelligence to predict users' ages, and must attempt to develop a dedicated "under-13-years-of-age prediction model" within the next two years.
However, the court declined to order some of the more far-reaching changes sought by prosecutors, noting that a request to alter Meta's algorithm design "would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230." The court also noted that federal children's privacy laws prevented it from ordering Meta to apply age-verification tools to children under 13, as the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits requesting children to submit personal data for age verification purposes.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez hailed the ruling as a landmark victory for child safety. "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," Torrez said in a statement, according to the Associated Press. "It sends an unmistakable message that companies will be held accountable when their product designs knowingly put children at risk."
Meta, which reported an annual profit of approximately $60 billion in 2025, has vowed to appeal the ruling. The company said in a statement: "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." Despite the size of the penalty, investors appeared to shrug off the ruling, with Meta's stock falling less than half a percent in after-hours trading.
The ruling is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for Meta as it faces an avalanche of lawsuits from thousands of families of children harmed by social media. The case is being closely watched across the United States as states, municipalities, and school districts pursue similar claims seeking to force changes at the industry level. For Meta, the New Mexico ruling represents both a significant financial penalty and a judicial rebuke that could shape the future of social media regulation for years to come.
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