New Mexico judge compares the harm caused to children by Facebook and Instagram to pollution escaping from a factory
By Lucretia Hughes Klucken
SANTA FE, N.M. — A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund addressing harm to children after a judge declared the company’s social media platforms a “public nuisance.”
Judge Bryan Biedscheid issued the ruling Thursday in the second phase of a landmark case brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez against the parent company of Facebook and Instagram.
Biedscheid compared Meta’s platforms to a factory and the psychological harm and sexual exploitation experienced by children to pollution released into the surrounding community.
Just as pollution does not remain inside a factory, the judge concluded, the damage connected to Meta’s platforms does not remain confined to a child’s phone or computer. It spreads into homes, schools, communities and the real world.
That is a comparison every parent should understand.
Children do not leave the consequences of social media behind when they close an app. Depression, anxiety, addiction, bullying, sexual exploitation and damaged self-worth follow them away from the screen.
The court ordered Meta to place $567 million into an abatement fund supporting programs intended to prevent and treat those harms in New Mexico. Approximately $420 million will be directed toward treatment services for young people. The remainder will support prevention, public awareness, screening, oversight and other programs over five years.
The judgment follows a March jury verdict ordering Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties for violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. Jurors found that the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed information about the risk of child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
Together, the two judgments bring Meta’s financial liability in the case to approximately $942 million.
But money alone will not protect children.
The court also ordered Meta to make significant changes to Facebook and Instagram for minors in New Mexico. Those requirements include stronger default privacy settings, restrictions on communications between adults and children, limits on notifications and greater efforts to determine whether young users are lying about their ages.
Instagram accounts belonging to users under 18 must remain private by default. On Facebook, minors’ friend recommendations are to be limited to other minors unless settings are changed with parental permission or the user verifies that he or she is an adult.
Accounts belonging to minors are not to be recommended to adult strangers, and adults who are not connected to minors will face restrictions on sending them messages.
The court also ordered Meta to pause push notifications for minors between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. and during school hours throughout the academic year. “Like” counts are to be hidden by default, and young users will face a mandatory limit of 90 hours per month across Facebook and Instagram.
That still amounts to about three hours a day — a troubling amount of time for a child to spend inside platforms designed to hold attention — but it is at least an acknowledgment that unlimited access can cause real harm.
Meta must also display regular safety information explaining how children can report inappropriate behavior and content. The company will be required to submit progress reports twice a year detailing its compliance with the court-ordered protections.
The ruling directs Meta to improve the technology it uses to estimate a user’s age. Within two years, the company must attempt to develop a model specifically designed to identify children younger than 13.
Meta must also work with schools or child safety organizations to create a system allowing authorized school personnel to report accounts suspected of belonging to underage children. If Meta determines that an account belongs to a child younger than 13, it must delete the personal information collected from that child.
The court did not approve every remedy sought by New Mexico. Biedscheid declined to order some proposed changes to Meta’s recommendation algorithms and expressed concern about federal privacy laws, constitutional questions and whether certain requirements were technologically possible.
WhatsApp was also excluded from portions of the public nuisance ruling.
Meta said it disagrees with the decision and plans to appeal. The company maintains that it works to protect young users and has been transparent about the challenges of identifying harmful content and bad actors.
Parents have heard those assurances before.
Technology companies frequently tell the public they are working hard to make their platforms safer. Yet parents continue to watch their children become trapped in endless scrolling, exposed to predators and bombarded with content that can damage their mental and emotional development.
Social media companies did not accidentally discover that outrage, insecurity, fear and sexualized content hold people’s attention. Their business models depend on engagement, and engagement produces advertising revenue.
When the user is a child, the moral responsibility becomes even greater.
Children are not products. Their vulnerabilities should never become tools for increasing screen time, collecting data or selling advertisements.
Parents carry the first responsibility for protecting their children, but parents cannot fight algorithms they cannot see, internal research they cannot access and corporations with billions of dollars at their disposal.
Government should never replace a parent. But it does have a legitimate responsibility to hold companies accountable when their products create widespread harm and when evidence shows that dangers were known but not honestly disclosed.
New Mexico’s case could become a roadmap for other states seeking to confront the effects of social media on children. Meta is already facing additional lawsuits from attorneys general, school districts and families across the country.
This ruling may also force a larger national conversation about whether Big Tech companies should continue receiving enormous profits while families and communities pay the cost of repairing the damage.
Meta has the right to appeal. The company is entitled to defend itself through the legal process.
But the central truth cannot be ignored: The virtual world produces real consequences.
A child suffering from depression is real. A teenager being targeted by a predator is real. A family mourning a young person lost to suicide is real. A generation being trained to measure its worth through likes, shares and manufactured online approval is real.
For years, Big Tech treated those consequences as somebody else’s problem.
Judge Biedscheid’s ruling sends a different message: If a company creates the pollution, it can be required to help clean it up.
Our children deserve more than apologies, carefully written corporate statements and safety features added only after lawsuits are filed.
They deserve protection before the damage is done.
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