Aniefiok Christopher
Social media and tech giant Meta has been fined $567 million ( N773,767,890,000) by a court in the US state of New Mexico, with the money to be used to address harms caused to young people by its Instagram and Facebook platforms.
The penalty is in addition to $375 million that Meta was ordered to pay in March as a result of a separate phase of the same court case.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid of Santa Fe also ordered various changes to the way Meta’s platforms operate for children using them in New Mexico after ruling yesterday (6 August) that the company had created a “public nuisance” in the state.
Also read
- Twitter, Meta Locked in legal fight over Threads App
- Meta’s Facebook, Instagram down as users across globe stranded
- Meta to lay off 11,000 employees
The $567 million is to be paid into an “abatement fund” deemed by the court to be “necessary due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy”.
The fund is broken into multiple categories, with $420 million to go towards “treatment”, $90 million to be spent on “screening and assessment”, and $33 million allocated to “awareness and prevention”.
The fund is subject to a five-year lifespan as per the judge’s ruling.
The penalty is in addition to the $375 million that Meta was ordered to pay in March as a result of a separate phase of the same court case in which a jury found that Meta endangered children by misleading users about the safety of its platforms.
Attorney-General Raúl Torrez, in bringing the case, had accused Meta of designing products that were addictive to young users and failing to protect children from sexual exploitation on its platforms.
In this second phase of the case – which was a non-jury or ‘bench’ trial – the prosecutor had asked the court to impose changes on Meta regarding the operation of their platforms in New Mexico.
Following the judge’s ruling, Meta must now implement various youth-safety measures, including: monthly limits on Facebook and Instagram use by teenagers; app notification restrictions; stricter controls on adult contact with minors; safeguards for AI chatbots; improved age verification tools; collaboration with schools and other bodies to facilitate disclosure of platform use by young children; and enhanced reviews of child sexual abuse reports.
Meta must also report twice a year on its progress in implementing the court-ordered measures. Not all remedies sought by the state against Meta were granted by the judge in his ruling.
WhatsApp, the third Meta-owned platform under scrutiny in the case, was found by the court not to be a “contributing cause to the public nuisance” and therefore would not be subject to the same orders as Instagram and Facebook.
“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,” a Meta spokesperson said.
“We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
The public nuisance designation applies to issues of health and safety that have become so widespread as to negatively impact a general public population. The judge wrote in his findings that “the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms and, instead, migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world and create a common, societal burden”.
Meta had disagreed with the designation at trial and also argued that the case singled out its platforms over other social media apps.
“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,” said Torrez.
“Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online.”
Thousands have filed lawsuits against social media companies over the alleged harm they pose to their users, including more than 40 US state attorney generals.
In April, the EU preliminarily found that Instagram and Facebook are in breach of its Digital Services Act for failing to “diligently” identify and mitigate risks that children under 13 face when using these platforms.
Meta’s recently published second-quarter financial report recorded a 55pc jump in costs and expenses from around $27 billion in 2025 to more than $42 billion this year due in part to a $2.4 billion outlay on charges around various legal proceedings. Meta’s revenue for the period ending 30 June came to $60.8 billion.
