By Yoo Jung
August 7, 2026 · 4 min readOn 8 August, Thursday, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to pay more than $900 million after the state argued that the company harmed young users through unsafe platform design and weak protections against sexual exploitation.
The ruling came in State District Court in Santa Fe and expanded a March jury verdict that had already ordered Meta to pay $375 million for violating New Mexico consumer-protection laws.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid added a $567 million abatement fund, which will support remedies for harms linked to Meta’s platforms, including treatment for young people affected by social media. New Mexico became the first state to test whether Meta could face direct legal responsibility for dangers that children encounter on Facebook and Instagram.
The ruling followed a lawsuit filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who accused Meta of misleading consumers about the safety of its platforms and allowing predators to reach minors.
State investigators posed as underage users to document solicitation, and the lawsuit described Instagram as a “breeding ground” for sexual exploitation. During the six-week trial, teachers, investigators, and whistle-blowers testified about safety concerns on Meta’s platforms.
In March, jurors concluded that Meta had misled users and enabled the sexual exploitation of young people. Torrez called the verdict “a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety.”
Judge Biedscheid’s later order increased the scale of the penalty and shifted the case from punishment toward repair. He wrote that the new fund was “necessary, due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy.”
In a separate ruling passage, he stated that Meta’s platforms were “a significant contributing factor to the current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth, "as established by the substantial evidence in this case” The fund fell below the $779.5 million that New Mexico’s attorneys had requested, yet it still created the largest financial penalty so far against Meta in its child-safety legal battles. Its purpose reaches beyond compensation because it aims to address long-term harm.
The judge also ordered Meta to change how young people in New Mexico use Facebook and Instagram. Meta must limit underage users in the state to no more than 90 hours a month on its platforms. It must stop sending push notifications to underage accounts between 10 p.m. and 7 a... It must also hide “likes” on photos by default for young users and disclose platform risks to users in New Mexico. These requirements target product design, attention habits, and social comparison.
Meta rejected the ruling and promised to appeal. A company spokesman said, “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, also said the company works “hard to keep people safe” and has remained “transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content.” Meta’s position frames the case as an inaccurate portrayal of its safety record rather than proof of deliberate wrongdoing. Its appeal will likely test how far courts can push social media companies to change platform design after a state-level consumer-protection verdict.
New Mexico officials framed the result as a model for broader action. Torrez said, “New Mexico led the way in the courtroom,” and added that “other states, and other countries confronting the same crisis, have a roadmap they can follow.”
After the March verdict, he said Meta executives “knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees and lied to the public about what they knew.”
After the latter ruling, Torrez said Meta had chosen “engagement and profit” over the safety of New Mexico’s children. His language shows that the state views the case as a question of corporate priorities, not simply technical failure.
The case also sits within a much larger legal wave against social media companies. Individuals, school districts, and state attorneys general have filed thousands of lawsuits against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube over alleged harm to young users.
Meta faces additional claims from teenagers, school districts, and attorneys general that features such as infinite scroll helped cause widespread harm. A separate trial brought by attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey was scheduled to begin jury selection in Oakland, California, next week. Meta said in a court filing that those states seek more than $1 trillion in damages.
The New Mexico case, therefore, marks a turning point because it produced both a major financial penalty and court-ordered design limits. Supporters describe it as accountability after years of warnings about youth safety, while Meta argues that the ruling misrepresents its efforts to protect teenagers online.
Child-safety advocates see the verdict as part of a broader movement to hold technology companies responsible for platform harms. As Matthew Bergman of the Social Media Victims Law Center put it after the March decision, “The chickens are coming home to roost.”Whether the ruling survives appeal or spreads to other states, it has already turned child safety from a public-relations issue into a direct legal and financial threat for one of the world’s largest social media companies.
