A New Mexico judge just handed Meta a $567 million bill — and, maybe more consequentially, a detailed blueprint for how a state thinks teen social media should actually work.
Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid ruled that New Mexico is in a youth mental health crisis and that Meta's platforms are "a significant contributing cause to the crisis," as reported by Social Media Today. The penalty caps the second phase of litigation brought by state Attorney General Raúl Torrez.
Now closing in on a billion dollars
This wasn't Meta's first loss in the case. Back in March, a jury found the company liable for failing to protect young users from child predators in its apps and approved $375 million in civil damages. Add the new ruling and Meta's total exposure in New Mexico hits $942 million. The money is earmarked for support, awareness, and prevention programs.
Meta isn't accepting it. Spokesman Andy Stone said on X that the company will appeal and that it remains confident in its record of protecting teens online.
The rules matter more than the money
For a company Meta's size, $942 million stings but doesn't wound. The judge's mandated changes are the more interesting part, because they read like a regulatory wish list made enforceable. In New Mexico, Meta must:
- Make all under-18 profiles private by default, and block adults from connecting with teens by default (something Meta says it already does)
- Kill push notifications for minors from 10pm to 7am every night — and from 8am to 3pm during the school year
- Hide like counts by default for users under 18
- Cap under-18 usage at 90 hours per month across Facebook and Instagram combined
- Demand proof of age from suspected underage users, and delete accounts of under-13s who don't verify within 30 days
That last pair is where things get hard. Rules only bite if age detection works, and the early evidence isn't encouraging. Australia's teen social media ban, per initial research, is having little effect — most teens have slipped past age checks or simply browse without an account, which still exposes them to plenty of harmful content.
A template other states can copy
Here's why this ruling travels beyond New Mexico. Courts and legislatures keep reaching for blunt instruments — outright teen bans chief among them — and the Australian experience suggests those don't deliver. Biedscheid's framework tries something else: leave teens on the platforms, but strip out the mechanics that do the damage. No 2am notification pings. No public like-count scoreboard. No unlimited hours.
If those measures show results, expect other attorneys general to borrow the template. Courts move slower than tech, but they set precedents in a way think-pieces never will.
The catch stays the same, though: none of it works without reliable age verification, and reliable age verification at scale probably means some kind of government-approved universal system applied to every platform — a solution with privacy problems of its own.
What happens next
The appeal will grind on, and Meta may yet claw back some of the $942 million. But the detailed conduct requirements are now on the record, written by a sitting judge who found the company partly responsible for a mental health crisis. Whether or not they survive appeal intact, they've shifted what "doing enough for teen safety" means in an American courtroom.
Worth watching your own state's AG for the follow-up.
Image: Ron Lach, via Pexels
