2026-08-07 14:19:13
Meta has been ordered to pay another $567 million (£421 million) after a US judge ruled its social media platforms created a “public nuisance” through harms caused to children.
The technology giant, which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads, was handed the order by Judge Bryan Biedscheid in New Mexico as the second stage of a landmark child-safety case.
The latest sum comes on top of $375 million in civil penalties previously imposed on the company, taking its total liability in the case to $942 million.
Bryan said Meta could be compared with a polluting factory, with advertising and content representing its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated”.
Meta said it would challenge the decision.
A spokesperson for the company said: “We disagree with the ruling and will appeal.”
They added: “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.”
The case began with a lawsuit brought by New Mexico in 2023, accusing Meta of failing to protect children using its platforms and exposing young users to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.
During the first phase of the trial, Meta was found to have repeatedly violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, including through recommendation algorithms that the state argued steered younger users towards harmful material and contacts.
In his ruling during the second phase, Judge Biedscheid found the effects reached the legal threshold of a “public nuisance”.
He compared the “harmful effects” of Meta’s platforms with the way “noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air”.
Judge Biedscheid said the effects did not remain confined to Meta’s platforms but “migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world”.
He said this resulted in “a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families”, as well as affecting schools, hospitals and law enforcement.
The $567 million will be placed into a fund intended to mitigate the effects identified by the court.
Of that sum, $420 million has been earmarked for treatment services, including funding “appropriate clinical or other behavioural health programs and professionals”.
Further funding will be used for awareness and prevention programmes, including training for teachers and health professionals dealing with harms involving children and social media.
The ruling also imposes changes on Meta’s platforms.
The company has been ordered to introduce measures restricting contact between adults and minors, along with safeguards covering explicit material.
The measures include preventing accounts belonging to users under 18 from being recommended to adults, restricting adults from messaging underage users and banning minors from sending or receiving nudity.
Meta must introduce a “1-strike policy for adult users who engage in child sexual exploitation” and remove visible “like” counts for users under 18.
Push notifications for minors must also be restricted overnight, while additional limits will apply during school hours.
The court ordered Meta to implement a usage limit of 90 cumulative hours each month across Instagram and Facebook for under-18 users – equivalent to about three hours a day.
The New Mexico judgment comes as Meta faces thousands of lawsuits in the US concerning allegations about the effects of its platforms on children and young people.
It also follows a landmark case in Los Angeles earlier this year concerning whether technology companies can be held liable over allegedly addictive platform designs.
Bruce Daisley, a former European vice-president of Twitter, now known as X, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme despite the scale of the New Mexico order, the amount was “a drop in the ocean” for Meta.
Meta recently reported $61 billion in revenue for the April-to-June quarter, an increase of 28 percent compared with the same period a year earlier.
Bruce said: “But it’s an indication that we are moving to a stage where social media is going to be tackled around the world.”
The judgment comes amid mounting international scrutiny of how social media companies treat younger users.
In Britain, the government has announced plans to ban under-16s from social media, with the first regulations expected to be introduced before the end of 2026 and the measures due to take effect in spring 2027.
Separate protections are planned for 16- and 17-year-olds, including default overnight restrictions between midnight and 6am and the automatic disabling of features including autoplay and personalised feeds. Older teenagers will be able to change those default settings.
Meta, founded through Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg, has grown from the original social networking site into one of the world’s biggest technology groups, operating Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads.
The New Mexico order also arrives as Meta prepares for further litigation in California, where attorneys general from nearly three dozen US states are pursuing the company over allegations involving children’s privacy and the design of its platforms.
Meta has said it intends to appeal the New Mexico ruling and has maintained that it works to protect teenagers using its services.
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