A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, to pay $567 million to address harms to young people linked to its social media platforms, the latest judgment in a landmark case brought by the state.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid issued the ruling late Thursday, ordering $420 million to be used for treatment services for young people. The remaining money will fund awareness and prevention programs, screening services and other related efforts over the next five years.
The award comes in addition to $375 million in civil penalties imposed by a jury in March, bringing Meta’s total liability in the New Mexico case to $942 million.
Jurors found that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed information about child sexual exploitation occurring on its platforms.
The combined judgment remains relatively small compared with Meta’s financial scale. The company reported roughly $60 billion in profit in 2025. Meta shares fell less than half a percent in after-hours trading Thursday, to $589.44.
New Mexico prosecutors had sought broader restrictions during the second phase of the case, including limits on features they described as addictive, stronger age-verification requirements and more restrictive default privacy settings intended to reduce child sexual exploitation.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the ruling as a significant accountability measure.
“Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online,” he said in a statement.
Meta said it intends to 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,” the company said in a statement. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
The ruling also imposes a series of requirements on Facebook and Instagram in New Mexico.
The platforms must create banners and informational screens explaining available safety features, recommended practices and tools for responding to inappropriate comments. Those notices must be displayed to users regularly. Meta must also conduct an educational campaign in the state that will be subject to review by New Mexico officials.
Federal privacy law limited some of the remedies available to the court.
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, restricts the collection of personal information from children under 13, preventing the court from simply requiring Meta to collect additional personal data or passively track children for age-verification purposes.
The court also concluded that imposing an age-verification requirement solely on Meta, rather than on competing platforms, would be “inequitable and unduly injurious.”
Instead, Meta must continue developing its existing age-assurance systems, which use artificial intelligence and other signals — including users’ friends and the content they consume — to estimate their ages.
The company must attempt to develop a dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” within two years.
When Meta determines that a New Mexico user is likely younger than 13, the company must request proof of age. Users believed to be younger than 13 — or younger than 18 when Meta cannot determine a more precise age — must be treated according to the applicable protections until they verify their age.
Meta must also work with schools or a child-safety organization to establish a reporting portal allowing staff members to flag accounts believed to belong to children under 13.
The company will be required to delete personal information collected from users determined to be younger than 13 and submit reports twice a year detailing its compliance with the court’s requirements.
The New Mexico case is one of several major legal challenges confronting Meta over the effect of its platforms on children.
Later this month, Meta is scheduled to go to trial in federal court in Oakland, California, against the first four of 29 states involved in multidistrict litigation filed in 2023. Those states allege that Meta knowingly designed features on Facebook and Instagram to encourage compulsive use by children and contributed to worsening mental health among young people.
Separate state-level lawsuits are also moving forward, including litigation in Tennessee.
Late last month, the families of four teenagers who died by suicide sued Meta, TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube, alleging “years of escalating harms” caused by the companies’ platforms.
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