New York —
Meta must tighten controls on children’s accounts and pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, a New Mexico judge ordered Thursday, in a ruling that dealt the social media giant another hefty penalty and compared it to polluting factories.
The ruling comes as Meta, along with other social media companies, face a reckoning over allegations of harms to children, including multiple lawsuits across the country.
A jury in March had already found Meta liable on all counts in a trial on child safety, including willfully engaging in “unfair and deceptive” and “unconscionable” trade practices. That earlier decision addressed concerns from parents, whistleblowers and lawmakers alike. Meta in that ruling was ordered to pay $375 million in damages.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez first sued Meta in 2023. He had claimed Meta created a “breeding ground” for child predators on Facebook and Instagram, which the company denied.
Meta said in a statement Thursday that it disagrees with the latest ruling and will appeal.
“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,” Meta said. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Thursday’s ruling goes beyond monetary penalties, however. Among other actions at least in the state, the judge said Meta must “Delete the accounts and all personal information collected from accounts belonging to a user under 13 years of age.”
The judge said Meta must turn off push notifications from 8 am to 3 pm on weekdays during the school year and 10 pm to 7 am on all other days for users under 18. New Mexico teen accounts also should automatically be set on private, and Meta also needs to stop New Mexico users from “engaging in romantic or sexualized interactions with Meta’s artificial intelligence chatbots.”
But the court ruling didn’t go as far as it could have. For example, the judge wrote that a request to change Meta’s algorithm design “would likely violate the First Amendment and Section 230.”
The ruling is part of a two-phrase trial. The first, to determine whether Meta misled users about dangers on its platform, resulted in a March jury ordering Meta to pay $375 million in damages. Meta said at the time that it “respectfully” disagreed and would appeal.
The second phase of the trial, before a judge, was to decide whether Meta’s platforms were a “public nuisance.”
Throughout Thursday’s ruling, Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta and its suite of apps to a factory — and its harm to puffing toxins into the air.
The court found that “just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms and, instead, migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world and create a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families and schools, as well as hospitals and law enforcement.”
The social media giant has been sued by various school districts and state attorney generals in lawsuits related to youth mental health, child safety and privacy.
And in May, Meta, YouTube, Snap and TikTok agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by a Kentucky school district over addiction claims — which had been set to be the first of hundreds of similar cases to go to trial. (Financial terms of the settlement were not disclosed.)
This story has been updated.
CNN’s Clare Duffy contributed to this report.
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