By Rajwa Quasim
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million for a fund aimed at addressing mental health harms among teenagers who use its platforms.
The judge also ordered the company to make several changes to Facebook and Instagram in a way it doesn’t harm children’s wellbeing. The case initially started in 2023 by state attorneys.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid ruled that Meta had created a public nuisance in New Mexico by designing platforms that could encourage addictive use among young users. He further added that the platform failed to adequately protect young users from sexual exploitation content, siding with State Attorney General Raúl Torrez.
“(J)ust 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 and create a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families and schools, as well as hospitals and law enforcement,” Biedscheid wrote.
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Torrez criticized the company saying it chose profit over child safety.
“This is not just a judgment against one company. It is a blueprint,” Torrez said. “Now other states, and other countries confronting the same crisis, have a roadmap they can follow.”
In the first ruling in March, the jury had ordered the company to pay $375 million in penalty. It had found the company violated the state’s consumer protection law. The latest ruling together makes the company pay around $942 million. About $420 million will go towards treatment of those that were already harmed through the platform through funding of appropriate clinical or other behavioral health programs and professionals. Another share will go towards awareness and prevention campaigns.
Meanwhile, the company said it would go for appeal and did not agree with the court’s ruling. “We disagree with the ruling and will appeal…We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content…. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” said the spokesperson of Meta.
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Meta had argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a federal law generally protects online platforms from being responsible for content posted by users. Meanwhile, the judge rejected the argument, saying the state was challenging Meta’s platform features and design, not the content posted by users.
The judge ordered Meta to introduce several safety measures, including the limit in use of Facebook and Instagram by teenagers, restrictions on notifications, safeguards for AI chatbots, and stronger control between interactions between minors and adults. Meta also has to strengthen its system for handling reports related to child sexual abuse, as per court orders.
As of now, around 40 states and 1,300 school districts sued social media companies alleging them of public nuisance and seeking these platforms to change how the platform works, reducing the damage. In the coming weeks, Meta has to defend multiple lawsuits in several states, including Oakland and Tennessee.