New Mexico court hits Meta with $567M more, pushing total to $942M over child harms

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay an additional $567m into a fund addressing the mental-health harms its platforms cause young people, on top of a $375m jury penalty from March. That brings the company’s total liability in the case to $942m, with roughly $420m earmarked for youth treatment services and the balance funding awareness, prevention, and screening over five years. The March verdict was the first to hold Meta liable for conduct on its platforms, and it followed a 2023 Guardian investigation into how Facebook and Instagram were used for child sex trafficking, plus accounts from former moderators whose grooming reports went unescalated.

The more consequential part of the ruling is the injunctive relief. The court declined to force Meta-specific age verification for under-13s—citing federal privacy law and calling a single-company mandate inequitable—but ordered Meta to keep sharpening its AI-based age-assurance tools, which infer age from a user’s friends and content. Meta must build an ‘under-13 prediction model’ within two years, demand proof of age from suspected under-13 users in New Mexico, default uncertain accounts to the most protective tier, stand up a school reporting portal, delete data collected on under-13 users, and report compliance twice a year.

The financial hit is trivial against Meta’s roughly $60bn in 2025 profit, and the company says it disagrees and will appeal. The real significance is precedential: with active cases in Tennessee and an upcoming federal trial in Oakland, New Mexico is being framed as the first domino in a state-by-state strategy. As one researcher put it, the U.S. won’t ban social media by statute, but states are finding leverage to regulate product designs they can show are harmful by design.