Meta must pay $567 million into a child mental health remediation fund and overhaul controls on youth accounts, a New Mexico judge ruled Thursday, extending a legal reckoning that began when Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued the company in 2023.
The order followed a March jury verdict, in a separate phase of the same case, that found Meta liable on all counts for willfully engaging in unfair and deceptive trade practices, resulting in $375 million in damages. Combined, the two rulings put Meta’s exposure in New Mexico alone above $940 million.
Presiding judge Bryan Biedscheid framed the platforms’ effects on minors in terms more familiar from environmental litigation than technology law, likening Meta’s reach to industrial pollution that migrates beyond its source and imposes costs on schools, hospitals and law enforcement.
The order requires Meta to delete accounts and data belonging to users under 13, restrict push notifications for minors during school hours and overnight, default teen accounts to private, and stop New Mexico users from having romantic or sexualized exchanges with the company’s AI chatbots.
The court declined to compel changes to Meta’s underlying recommendation algorithm, finding such an order would likely conflict with the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Meta has said it disagrees with the ruling and intends to appeal.
In-house counsel at technology and social media companies now face a sharper split between two categories of risk that had previously blurred together in litigation strategy. Content and design features remain open to state enforcement and civil liability, while algorithmic ranking decisions retain meaningful statutory and constitutional cover.
That distinction is likely to shape how companies triage compliance spending, with account verification, notification defaults and chatbot interaction limits becoming areas where regulators and plaintiffs’ counsel can secure concrete, court-ordered changes.
Litigation teams advising platforms with youth users should also note the pattern building across jurisdictions: Meta, YouTube, Snap and TikTok settled a related Kentucky school district claim in May rather than proceed to trial, suggesting that even well-resourced defendants are increasingly weighing exposure against courtroom uncertainty on child safety claims.
Multiple state attorneys general and school districts are pursuing similar theories, and the New Mexico order gives litigators and general counsel elsewhere a concrete template: asset-based funds, account-level defaults, and chatbot restrictions are all now on the table for the next wave of filings. Algorithmic design claims, by contrast, remain blocked by the same First Amendment and Section 230 barriers the court cited here.
