A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay a further $567m (£421m) over its failure to warn the public about the dangers its platforms posed to children, in what is the largest ruling against the company on child safety.
The order, issued on Thursday by Judge Bryan Biedscheid at the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, comes on top of $375m in civil penalties that jurors imposed on the parent company of Facebook and Instagram in March, bringing the total to $942m.
Judge Biedscheid found that Meta had created a public nuisance in New Mexico, siding with the state's attorney general, Raúl Torrez, a Democrat, who accused the company of designing its products to addict young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation. The judge wrote that Meta's platforms were contributing to the "current mental health crisis among New Mexico's youth".
He compared the company to a factory, describing advertising and content as its product and "the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated". The finding appears to be the first time a social media company has been held to constitute a public nuisance, a legal theory more commonly applied to air pollution and other widespread health and safety harms.
The money must be paid into a fund aimed at reducing future harm. According to the order, roughly $420m will go towards treatment of harms already caused, through the funding of "appropriate clinical or other behavioural health programmes and professionals". The remainder is directed towards prevention, awareness, screening services and related costs over five years, including training for teachers and health professionals on how to respond to social media harms.
The decree also imposes wide-ranging design changes on Meta's platforms in New Mexico for five years. These include monthly limits on teenagers' use of Facebook and Instagram, restrictions on notifications, tighter controls on adult contact with minors, safeguards for AI chatbots and enhanced review of child sexual abuse reports. Meta must hide "like" counts by default for underage users, build banner and information screens explaining its safety tools, and publicly disclose platform risks on its website.
Because the federal Children's Online Privacy Protection Act limits what the court can require on data collection, the judge stopped short of mandating identity-based age verification. Instead, Meta must improve its existing age-assurance tools, including AI-based age estimation, and develop a dedicated model for identifying under-13s within two years. Users estimated to be under 13 must be asked for proof of age and treated as children until they verify it. The company must also work with schools or a child safety organisation to create a reporting portal for suspected underage accounts, purge personal data gathered from under-13s and report to the court twice a year.
Meta said it would challenge the decision.
"We disagree with the 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."
The company argued at trial that it had never guaranteed complete safety to teenage users and had consistently disclosed that bad actors can misuse its networks.
Mr Torrez said the judgment "forces real changes to how Meta operates in New Mexico" and called it a "blueprint" for other states. Investors were largely unmoved, with Meta's shares down less than half a per cent in after-hours trading to $589.44. The combined $942m is a fraction of the company's roughly $60bn profit in 2025.
The case, brought in December 2023 after an undercover investigation using decoy child accounts, is being watched closely. Four states are seeking $1.4tn in penalties at a trial due in Oakland, California, this month, while in the UK Ofcom is pursuing its own child-safety enforcement under the Online Safety Act.
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