A New Mexico judge branded Facebook and Instagram owner Meta a “public nuisance,” and ordered the company to pay $567 million into a fund to remediate harms its apps caused to children.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid found in his ruling late Thursday that teenagers in the state were in the midst of a mental health crisis and that Meta’s platforms were a “significant contributing cause.”
“Meta’s platforms create a public nuisance because their purpose and effect is to optimize engagement, including in ways that are detrimental to teenagers’ health and safety,” the judge wrote.
The bulk of the $567 million payout would be used to fund mental health treatment and education, the ruling said. The case was brought against Meta by New Mexico’s attorney general, who alleged that the company’s apps had put children at risk.
The ruling adds to the company’s losses in court this year as judges and juries have weighed whether its platforms pose a danger to children. In March, a jury issued a $375 million verdict against Meta in an earlier phase of the New Mexico case. The same month, a jury in Los Angeles dealt the company another defeat, siding with a young woman who alleged she had suffered depression after becoming hooked on Facebook and Instagram due to Meta’s negligence.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) brought the case against Meta following an unusual undercover probe in which investigators posed as children in an attempt to prove that Facebook and Instagram’s algorithms connected young users with abusers.
“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 in a statement. “Today, Meta is paying for that choice.”
Meta said it would 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,” the company said in a statement Thursday. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Meta and other social media companies are facing a wave of lawsuits brought by states, school districts and young people who say they have suffered as a result of addiction to being online.
For years, the tech industry avoided liability in court, defending itself using free speech protections and a crucial law from the internet’s early days.
The current round of lawsuits target the design of social media platforms, alleging that tech giants designed their products and algorithms in ways aimed at encouraging heavy use and created other risks.
The verdicts this year in New Mexico and Los Angeles were the first sign that this approach, treating digital services like faulty products, could score legal blows on major tech platforms.
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