New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $942 million in landmark child safety ruling

A New Mexico judge on Thursday ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a court-administered abatement fund, bringing the company's total liability in a landmark child safety case to $942 million — one of the largest accountability verdicts against a social media platform in U.S. history.

How the $942 Million Total Came Together

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed suit against Meta in 2023, accusing the company of knowingly allowing child sexual abuse material to spread across Facebook and Instagram while prioritizing advertising revenue over user safety. In March 2026, a jury found Meta violated New Mexico's consumer protection laws and ordered it to pay $375 million. The additional $567 million came Thursday from First Judicial Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid, who determined that the earlier verdict did not adequately address the broader public harm Meta's platforms have caused.

A Factory Analogy the Judge Used Deliberately

In a 60-page ruling, Judge Biedscheid declared Meta's platforms a "public nuisance" — a legal designation typically reserved for environmental harms. The factory comparison was deliberate: "Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, 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."

The abatement fund will finance public awareness campaigns, prevention programs, and mental health treatment for those harmed — a mechanism borrowed directly from tobacco and opioid litigation.

Mandatory Platform Changes

The court ordered Meta to make specific product changes affecting New Mexico minors: prohibit romantic or sexualized interactions between underage users and Meta's AI chatbots, eliminate push notifications during late-night hours, and display a weekly resource banner with mental health links for users under 18. The judge stopped short of mandating algorithmic changes, citing First Amendment protections and Section 230 limitations on courts' ability to dictate content curation.

Meta Appeals as More Cases Pile Up

Meta said it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal, calling its safety practices "transparent" and its record strong. But the $942 million total arrives alongside a cascade of similar cases. In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing addictive features that harmed a California woman's mental health. A separate California trial involving Meta's youth safety practices is set to begin this month. As first reported by the Los Angeles Times, attorneys general in dozens of other states are watching the New Mexico case closely as a template for their own litigation.