A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million for building platforms that a court says hook kids on endless scrolling, feed them sexually explicit content, and connect them with predators — a penalty that amounts to roughly a day's revenue for a company pulling in over $160 billion a year. And Meta is already appealing.
Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid found Thursday that Facebook and Instagram constitute a "public nuisance" under state law, concluding the platforms are engineered to "capture attention, including by taking advantage of teenagers' developing brains and encouraging problematic use." The ruling adds $567 million in abatement costs — mostly for youth mental health treatment — to the $375 million fine a jury imposed in March after finding Meta violated consumer protection laws by misleading users about platform safety. Combined total: $942 million. For a trillion-dollar company, that's a parking ticket.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in December 2023 after investigators ran decoy accounts of children 14 and under. What they found: minors were served sexually explicit material while adults used the platforms to solicit and pressure them into providing pornographic content. "This case has always been about protecting children, standing up for families and making sure that one of the world's largest technology companies cannot profit from practices that endanger young people without consequence," Torrez said in a statement.
But the consequence is mostly theater. The state asked for $3.7 billion, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The judge gave them 15 cents on the dollar and shrank the spending window from 15 years to five. More importantly, Biedscheid declined to order any changes to Meta's algorithms — the engagement-optimization engine that keeps kids scrolling and generates the ad revenue. He also rejected some age-verification mandates as "unreasonable," noting that requiring verification only of Meta and not its competitors would be "inequitable and unduly injurious" to the company.
The structural changes the court did order are modest: minors capped at 90 hours per month on Facebook and Instagram combined; push notifications paused from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. and during school hours; "like" counts hidden by default for users under 18; private-by-default settings for underage accounts; and restrictions barring unconnected adults from messaging minors. WhatsApp was excluded from the nuisance finding entirely.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company "work[s] hard to keep people safe on our platforms" and "remain[s] confident in our record of protecting teens online," adding Meta will appeal. Back in April, the company threatened to shut down its apps in New Mexico if the ruling proved too onerous — a move Torrez dismissed as a "PR stunt."
The New York Times framed the penalty as "the largest financial penalty yet" against Meta — technically accurate, but a framing that obscures the reality that the sum is a rounding error for a company of this scale. The Guardian highlighted its own 2023 investigation revealing Facebook and Instagram had become marketplaces for child sex trafficking, and cited former Meta moderators who said flagged harmful content was never escalated.
Maralyn Beck, executive director of the New Mexico Child First Network, put it plainly: "A generation of children has been growing up in a digital playground without safeguards or protections."
Meta now faces thousands of lawsuits nationwide, with a trial later this month in Oakland brought by attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey. The question isn't whether the platforms are harming kids — the court settled that. The question is whether a fine that amounts to a day's revenue and a set of remedies that leave the profit algorithm untouched constitutes accountability or a performance. Meta is appealing. The kids are still scrolling.
