Meta must pay $567 million in New Mexico teen safety case

The ruling adds to a $374 million penalty a New Mexico jury decided in March; the combined funds will go to youth mental health programs and platform reforms. Young people look at their smartphones as they lounge on brick steps outside on a sunny day. (natureaddict/ Pixabay via Courthouse News) (CN) — A New Mexico state judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a fund for youth mental health treatment and prevention on Thursday, finding the tech giant contributed to psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children. First Judicial District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid compared Meta’s platforms to a polluting factory, an analogy Meta’s own attorneys had used at trial to try to limit the scope of relief the state could win. “The court considers Meta’s platforms to be analogous to the factory,” Biedscheid wrote in his order. “The advertising and other content displayed on those platforms to be what is produced by the factory, and the psychological harm to and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated.” The ruling caps a two-phase trial that opened in February with a jury deciding whether Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by hiding its platforms’ risks from teenagers, then closed in May with Biedscheid alone weighing whether Facebook and Instagram’s design features created a public nuisance under state law. The jury sided with the state in March, finding 75,000 violations of the consumer protection law and setting a $375 million penalty. Biedscheid’s order adds the new $567 million abatement fund on top of that verdict, bringing Meta’s total New Mexico bill north of $940 million. Most of the new fund, $420 million, is earmarked for treatment: community and family-based mental health services for New Mexico youth. The rest is split between screening and assessment, prevention campaigns, referral and coordination programs and oversight of the fund itself. Biedscheid’s findings describe a state already in crisis before Meta enters the picture. Suicide has ranked as the leading or second-leading cause of death among New Mexico adolescents in recent years, and the judge cited testimony that persistent sadness and hopelessness among the state’s high schoolers rose 16% between 2013 and 2023. Meta’s own engagement-driving design, he concluded, made that crisis worse and made children more accessible to predators. Biedscheid pointed to Meta’s internal research showing that its recommendation systems connected adults with children’s accounts on Instagram, sometimes steering predators directly toward minors. A 2019 internal test found that 26% of the accounts Instagram recommended to users it had flagged as likely groomers were teenagers. A 2020 internal chat went further, attributing 80% of the platform’s “violating adult/minor connections” to a single recommendation feature. Arturo Bejar, a former Meta engineering director who later consulted for Instagram’s Well-Being team, testified that the platform “is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.” Biedscheid rejected Meta’s argument that it couldn’t be held responsible because other apps compete for teenagers’ attention too, and because poverty, trauma and other factors also drive youth mental illness. Meta only has to abate the nuisance “to the extent of its contributions,” he wrote, not solve New Mexico’s mental health crisis single-handedly. He trimmed the state’s funding request accordingly, cutting a proposed 15-year abatement plan to five years and scaling back several categories to reflect Meta’s share of the harm. His order also imposes a five-year list of operational changes: age-verification measures that stop short of the personal data collecti