A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million on Thursday, ruling the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms contributed to a youth mental health crisis in the state.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid handed down the ruling in the second phase of a trial Meta lost in March. A jury in that first phase found the company violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act and ordered $375 million in civil penalties, determining Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
Of the new $567 million judgment, $420 million will go toward treatment services for young people over the next five years. The remainder is earmarked for prevention campaigns, mental health screenings and related costs, according to the ruling.
“Meta’s platforms and its conduct related to those platforms cause harms that significantly interfere with public safety, public peace, and public comfort,” Biedscheid wrote in his decision. “Those harms are of a continuing and long-lasting nature, and Meta has interfered with a public right and shared public resources.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez, who brought the case, said the ruling should serve as a template for other states.
“For years, Meta knew its platforms were harming New Mexico’s kids, from feeding a youth mental health crisis to connecting predators with children, and it chose engagement and profit over their safety,” Torrez said. “This is not just a judgment against one company. It is a blueprint.”
The court also considered whether to order Meta to overhaul its age-verification systems and default privacy settings. Biedscheid found that federal law, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, blocks Meta from collecting personal data to verify ages for users under 13. The judge also declined to impose age-verification rules on Meta alone, writing that singling out one company while leaving competitors untouched would be “inequitable and unduly injurious.”
“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 spokesperson said. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Meta threatened to shut down its social media platforms in New Mexico after the March verdict, arguing the state’s demands were “in many cases technologically impractical or completely impossible.”
