SANTA FE — A New Mexico district judge on Thursday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $567 million to fund treatment and prevention programs for young people harmed by Instagram and Facebook, in the second phase of a public-nuisance judgment against the company and the largest child-safety fine it has faced.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid directed Meta to put the money into an abatement fund, with $420 million earmarked for clinical and behavioral treatment of young users already harmed and the remainder for awareness training, screening services and prevention work over the next five years. Thursday's order follows the $375 million in civil penalties a Santa Fe jury imposed in March at the close of the trial's first phase, bringing Meta's exposure in the case to $942 million.
What the judge ordered
Biedscheid also imposed operational obligations on Meta inside New Mexico. The company must continue improving its "age assurance" tools, which use artificial intelligence to estimate a user's age from account behavior, and must attempt to build a dedicated "under-13-years-of-age prediction model" within two years. If Meta's systems flag a user as under 13, or cannot pin down an age below 18, the company must treat the account as belonging to a child until the user verifies an age.
Meta must also request proof of age from users its systems suspect are under 13, delete personal information already collected on under-13 accounts, and build a reporting portal with schools or a child-safety group so staff can flag suspected underage users. The company must file progress reports on the abatement plan twice a year. Facebook and Instagram will also display banner and information screens describing default protections and reporting tools to New Mexico users, subject to state review.
Where the court stopped
Biedscheid declined to order Meta to verify the ages of every New Mexico user, writing that federal law would prevent a state court from compelling that step for children under 13. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the judge said, bars requiring Meta to collect personal data from or passively track users younger than 13, even for age-verification purposes.
The judge also noted that ordering Meta alone to run full age verification while leaving other social platforms untouched would be "inequitable and unduly injurious" to the company, and directed the incremental measures instead.
Meta's response
"We disagree with the ruling and will appeal," Meta spokesman Andy Stone said, adding that the company remained "confident in our record of protecting teens online" and would keep defending itself "against claims that misrepresent the facts." Meta reported $61 billion in revenue in the second quarter, up 28 percent from a year earlier.
Bruce Daisley, a former European vice president of Twitter, told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that the fine was "a drop in the ocean" for Meta.
Absent voices
Thursday's reporting drew almost entirely from the court's order, the New Mexico attorney general's office and Meta's written statement. The company has not publicly detailed the grounds for its appeal or contested the factual basis for any specific operational order, and no industry or independent technical response appeared in the wires that carried the ruling. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, whose office filed the 2023 lawsuit, called the decision "a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child."
A separate case brought by nearly three dozen state attorneys general is set to open in California next week, the BBC reported, testing similar public-nuisance theories against Meta at the federal level.