Meta must adopt new safety procedures and pay $567 million to help those harmed by Facebook and Instagram, a New Mexico judge ruled last week.
The costly order, which Judge Bryan Biedscheid handed down on August 6, concludes the second and final phase of proceedings in New Mexico v. Meta, a landmark case holding the social media juggernaut accountable for exploiting children.
Meta leaves court with orders to pay monetary damages totaling $942 million.
It vowed to appeal the catastrophic result.
“We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” a spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.
New Mexico v. Meta, which the state of New Mexico filed against Meta in 2023, presented evidence from an undercover operation in which law enforcement agents posed as children on Instagram and Facebook.
The investigation found Meta’s platforms:
Show underage users sexually explicit content without prompting.
Allow adult predators to contact children and sexually exploit them.
Facilitate the spread and exchange of child pornography.
In some cases, the state claimed, Facebook recommended children join groups “devoted to facilitating commercial sex.”
In another case, investigators say Meta “allowed a fictious mother [to] to offer her 13-year-old daughter for sale to sex traffickers and to create a professional page to allow her daughter to share revenue from advertising.”
On March 24, a jury found Meta violated New Mexico’s consumer protection laws by endangering children and “misleading consumers” about the safety of its social media platforms.
The court ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties — $5,000 for each of the 75,000 times the jury found it violated state law.
But the jury’s ruling didn’t end the trial. Judge Biedscheid still had to rule on one more question — whether Meta constituted a “public nuisance,” defined as “knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare.”
On August 6, the judge sided with New Mexico, ruling that Meta was a public nuisance and that action must be taken to stop it from further harming the state.
Meta’s $567 million fine will go toward an abatement fund “aimed at rectifying harms caused by the company’s social media apps,” the Journal reports, a measure Biedschied justified “due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy.”
Meta must also implement several court-ordered safety measures to prevent further harm to minors in New Mexico, including:
Limiting minors to 90 hours on the platforms or less per month.
Shutting off push-notifications overnight and during school hours.
Requiring parental consent before minors can see how many likes their posts receive.
Blurring suspected nude images.
Preventing Meta chatbots from conducting sexual interactions with minors.
Meta must provide semi-annual compliance reports to the court for five years.
Meta tried to escape the ruling using Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a law which states online forums cannot be held liable for the content users post to their sites.
Meta and other social media companies frequently use Section 230 as a legal shield for any illegal, abusive or addictive content on their platforms. Importantly, the judge did not accept this silver bullet defense. New Mexico did not classify Meta a public nuisance because of types of content on its platforms, but because of the addictive and exploitative design of the platforms’ themselves.
This damaging precedent could not come at a worse time for Meta, which faces thousands of similar cases from state attorneys general, school boards and citizens claiming Instagram and Facebook are defective, addictive products.
“For the first time, a court has ruled that a social media giant can be held liable for building products that endanger children, and has ordered the structural changes needed to fix it,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez wrote in a statement.
“It is a blueprint other states, and other countries confronting this same crisis, can follow.”
Jury selection for a case in which the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey allege Meta intentionally made its products addictive for children begins this week.
Meta believes a verdict in the states’ favor could cost it up to $1.4 trillion.
Additional Articles and Resources
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