A New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harm to teens

Meta has been handed one of its largest court penalties yet over its effect on young people, after a New Mexico judge ordered the company to pay $567m into a fund for youth mental health.

The ruling has a clear structure: of the total, $420m is earmarked for treatment services for young people, while the remainder covers awareness, prevention and screening over the next five years.

The figure came in the second phase of a closely watched trial, and Judge Bryan Biedscheid handed it down after an earlier stage of the case had already gone against the company.

Those findings were damning, because the court concluded that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and designed features with addictive properties aimed at minors, all while failing to act on what it knew.

For the state, the decision was about accountability. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called it a victory for every parent worried about social media’s effect on children, casting the ruling as a check on the company’s conduct.

Meta rejected the conclusions just as firmly, saying it works hard to keep people safe on its platforms and arguing that the claims misrepresent the facts, and it has vowed to appeal the ruling in full.

An appeal means this is far from over, since the penalty could still be reduced or overturned on review, and the legal wrangling is likely to stretch on for years well beyond this single decision. Nor is the New Mexico case an isolated one.

The ruling follows an earlier jury verdict against Meta this year, and the company faces a wave of further litigation over the same underlying concerns, including lawsuits from dozens of states, federal multi-district litigation, and wrongful-death suits brought by families who blame its platforms for harm to their children.

Viewed that way, the New Mexico decision fits a broader reckoning, as governments have grown increasingly willing to hold platforms responsible for their effect on young users and have moved from warnings to concrete penalties.

Legislators, meanwhile, have gone further still: Greece is preparing to bar under-15s from social media from 2027, part of a European turn toward keeping children off the platforms entirely.

Britain is weighing similar limits, having debated an under-16 social media ban, and France has moved closer to its own restrictions, in what amounts to a continent-wide shift in mood.

The courts are a second front. Platforms have already paid large sums to avoid trials, including a settlement that exceeded a school district’s annual budget, and the New Mexico ruling shows what can happen when a case instead goes the distance and reaches a judgment in open court.

The design of the remedy is notable in itself, because rather than a lump-sum penalty, the money is channelled into treatment, prevention and screening, which frames the harm as a public-health problem the state must now address.

That framing is spreading, too, as attorneys general increasingly treat social-media harm to minors as a matter for the courts, borrowing tactics honed against tobacco and opioid companies.

Meta’s defence has stayed consistent across these cases. It argues that it has built extensive safety tools and parental controls, and that plaintiffs cherry-pick internal documents to tell a misleading story.

Even so, the size of the award matters less than the message it sends, since for a company of Meta’s scale $567m is absorbable, whereas a judicial finding that it knowingly harmed children is the kind of precedent that can echo through dozens of pending suits.

For Meta, in other words, the financial hit is manageable but the precedent is not. A court willing to find that it knowingly harmed children, and to put a price on that harm, is exactly the outcome the company’s many remaining cases will now be eager to cite.