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- A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund after a jury ruled the company willfully violated the state’s unfair practices act.
- Meta’s platforms are contributing to the “current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth,” the judge wrote in the filing on Thursday.
- The determination is tied to a child safety case against Meta, one of manysuits the company faces related to how kids use its apps.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is seen in the U.S. Capitol after a meeting in the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., March 26, 2026.Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Meta was ordered to pay $567 million into an abatement fund in New Mexico as part of a public nuisance case that’s just one of many suits the company faces related to alleged harms caused by its apps.
The fund comes on top of the $375 million in civil penalties that Meta was forced to pay earlier this year when it was found to have violated New Mexico’s unfair practices act. The second phase of the trial, which began in May, would establish if Meta’s actions created a public nuisance, thus warranting potential product changes.
“Although Meta is not alone in this regard, its social media platforms are a significant contributing factor to the current mental health crisis among New Mexico’s youth established by the substantial evidence in this case,” Judge Bryan Biedscheid wrote in the ruling on Thursday.
Most of the money in the fund — $420 million — is dedicated to treatment for people harmed by the platform. The rest is for awareness and prevention, screening and assessment and referrals and coordination, as well as implementation, quality improvement and evaluation.
For Meta and its peers, the case is one of several this year that experts have characterized as social media’s “Big Tobacco” moment. In the 1990s, tobacco companies were forced to pay billions of dollars for misleading the public about the safety and potential harms of their products, and subsequently saw their power and influence dwindle dramatically.
Meta noted in its second-quarter financial filing that, “the New Mexico Attorney General has indicated that they intend to seek up to $62.85 billion in penalties in this case.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2023 following an undercover operation involving the creation of a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl that he previously told CNBC “was simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.
As part of the case, Torrez was seeking to force Meta to overhaul its apps by implementing features like effective age-verification technologies, altering recommendation algorithms that don’t compromise child well-being and making other modifications that result in “fundamentally restructuring how Meta is allowed to do business in the state,” the AG said at a press briefing before the second phase of the trial began.
In addition to the abatement fund, Thursday’s order requires Meta to continue improving “age assurance models and tools in New Mexico” using AI, and to attempt “to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model.”
Other remedies include making it easier to report underage usage, and partnering “with schools or a child safety organization to create a reporting portal where school administrators can flag suspected accounts where users may be under 13 years of age across any social media platform.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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