A landmark legal battle involving Meta has reached a significant milestone in New Mexico, in which a state court ordered the tech giant to pay $567 million in the second phase of a major lawsuit. This high-profile case addresses deep harm for young people on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. The recent judgment follows a key moment in March of this year when the social media conglomerate lost the case, and it will be followed up with penalties and judicial reviews of child safety and corporate accountability.
Judge Bryan Biedcheid made this ruling as to how the great financial penalty would be spent to combat platform harm to young people. According to The Associated Press, $420 million of the total sum would go towards establishing and expanding treatment services for young people. The rest will be distributed in five years to fund targeted awareness programs, preventive measures, screening programs, and other related operations aimed at protecting youth mental health.
The legal process was organized in distinct phases, with a trial in which jurors ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties. That basic stage of the case resulted in a jury concluding that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and information about child sexual exploitation risks was not properly communicated at Meta on a regular basis. As the lawsuit moved into the second stage, state prosecutors asked the presiding judge to mandate fundamental operational changes at Meta. They proposed to remove addictive features and enhance age verification, and to prevent child sexual exploitation by setting default privacy settings and much closer regulation.
Despite the prosecution’s demands for structural reform, the court found some legal restrictions in place to make regulatory enforcement an issue. Federal children’s privacy legislation, the Children’s Online Privacy Act (COPPA), also prevents Meta from using age verification tools directly with children who are younger than 13 years. Under COPPA, Meta cannot legally require children to hand over their personal information, or to be tracked passively online, as long as it only does so for the purposes of age verification. The court also observed that when Meta is trying to verify ages of children while leaving other social media companies exempt, it is unfair and unduly damaging to the business.
After this overwhelming financial penalty and the complex legal decisions, major news organizations, including The Associated Press, have reached out directly to New Mexico's Department of Justice and representatives at Meta to get some official response and future analysis of the court’s decision.
