New Mexico Set a Trap for Predators on Meta’s Apps. Three Years Later, a Judge Put the Company’s Bill at $942 Million.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on August 6, 2026 to pay $567,000,000into a child-safety fund and rewrite how Facebook and Instagram operate for minors in the state — on top of $375,000,000a jury awarded in March, bringing the company’s total liability in the case to $942,000,000. Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid of the First Judicial District Court found that Meta’s own engagement-optimized design made its platforms a “public nuisance” in New Mexico.
The case traces back to December 2023, when Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta Platforms Inc. — and, initially, CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally — after state investigators built a decoy profile posing as a 13-year-old girl. According to Torrez, the account was almost immediately “inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from adults.
Meta says it disagrees with the ruling and will appeal. Torrez calls it “a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child.” What the court record actually shows — in unsealed internal documents, sworn testimony and the judge’s own 68-page order — is more specific than either side’s talking point.
- $942,000,000 Meta's combined liability in the New Mexico case — the March jury verdict plus the August abatement fund — First Judicial District Court, Santa Fe
- ~500,000 estimated daily instances of child exploitation on Meta's platforms, per a company safety researcher's own figures shown to the jury — Trial evidence, reported by AP/Yahoo News & Malwarebytes
- 75,000 statutory violations the jury found — two counts tied to each of 37,500 New Mexico users, at the $5,000-per-violation maximum — CNBC / Barchart
- $3,500,000–$27,000,000 Meta's own settlement counter-offer for the abatement fund the judge rejected — versus the $567 million he ordered — TheWrap
Biedscheid’s order runs 68 pages, and its central metaphor is borrowed, pointedly, from Meta’s own defense. Meta’s lawyers had compared its platforms to a factory during closing arguments; the judge took the analogy and turned it against the company. Advertising and content are the factory’s products, he wrote — and psychological harm and child sexual exploitation are the pollution, which does not stay contained on the platform but “migrate[s] to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world.”
Adopting Meta’s factory comparison, Biedscheid said the remedy was designed to make the company “cease contamination rather than shutting the operation down” — which is why the order requires a five-year rebuild of how the platforms treat minors in New Mexico rather than a shutdown or an outright feature ban.
Of the $567,000,000 abatement fund, $420,000,000 — the bulk of it — is earmarked for treatment services for young people harmed by the platforms. The remainder funds awareness and prevention campaigns, screening and assessment, referral coordination, and implementation oversight, paid out over five years rather than the 15-year term the state had originally proposed.
Meta must pay $567 million into a fund to remedy its role in a youth mental health crisis, on top of a previously decided $375 million in penalties, a New Mexico judge has ruled.
A New Mexico court orders @instagram and @facebook parent company @Meta to pay 567 million US dollars to address the harm its platforms have caused to young people, marking the second phase of a landmark case the company lost in March.
The case did not start with a spreadsheet of complaints. It started with New Mexico Department of Justice investigators building a decoy account for a fictitious 13-year-old girl in 2023 and watching what happened to it. Torrez has said the profile was “simply inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from adults within days. The complaint filed that December characterized Meta’s platforms as “a breeding ground for predators who target children for human trafficking, the distribution of sexual images, grooming, and solicitation.”
The original complaint named Meta Platforms Inc. and, individually, Mark Zuckerberg. That did not last: in June 2024, a judge rejected Meta’s bid to dismiss the core claims outright but granted a separate motion dismissing Zuckerberg as a personal defendant, leaving the corporation to answer for the allegations alone. The case that finally reached trial in February 2026 was New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., not New Mexico v. Zuckerberg.
The undercover approach did not stop once the lawsuit was filed. In May 2026, mid-trial, the state announced “Operation MetaPhile” — the arrest of three men accused of being online predators after they engaged with a separate set of decoy accounts New Mexico investigators had set up posing as underage users. It was a live demonstration, timed almost exactly to the case’s second phase, of the exact behavior the lawsuit said Meta’s design made too easy.
The six-week jury trial that opened February 10, 2026 turned on documents Meta had fought to keep sealed. One, from a company safety researcher, estimated the platform was seeing “on the order of half a million instances of child exploitation per day.” Another set of internal messages discussed how CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 decision to make Facebook Messenger end-to-end encrypted by default would affect the company’s ability to detect and report roughly 7.5 million child-sexual-abuse-material cases a year to law enforcement — a trade-off employees debated internally before the feature shipped.
Stanford psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke testified for the state on the design side of that evidence. According to trial coverage, she told jurors that Meta internally used the phrase “Problematic Internet Use” in place of the word “addiction” — a distinction her testimony framed as a deliberate way of describing the same behavior without naming it. The jury’s verdict, on March 24, 2026, suggests they found the company’s public language about safety did not match what its own internal documents said.
“For years, Meta knew its platforms were harming New Mexico's kids, from feeding a youth mental health crisis to connecting predators with children, and it chose engagement and profit over their safety.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, following the August 6, 2026 ruling
Jurors found 75,000 separate violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act — two counts, misrepresentation and unconscionable trade practices, tied to each of 37,500 New Mexico users — and assessed the $5,000 statutory maximum on every one of them, for $375,000,000.
The jury verdict decided liability. It did not decide what Meta had to actually change — that was Phase 2, a three-week bench trial that opened May 4, 2026 with no jury, only Biedscheid weighing whether the platforms constituted an ongoing public nuisance and, if so, what to order. Before testimony even began, Meta warned it might withdraw Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico entirely rather than comply with the state’s proposed remedies, which included blocking known under-13 users, ending default end-to-end encryption for minors, and installing a court-appointed Child Safety Monitor funded by Meta for at least five years.
Torrez dismissed the withdrawal threat as a “PR stunt,” arguing Meta had redesigned its products before and adapted to other markets’ rules without leaving. Meta called the state’s proposed remedies “misguided,” arguing they singled out two apps out of the hundreds teenagers use and infringed on parental rights and free expression. Thirteen days of testimony followed. By the time it concluded, the state was asking for roughly $1,000,000,000paid out over 15 years; Meta’s own counter-proposal for the fund ranged from $3,500,000 to $27,000,000— a gap of more than 20-to-1 from what the judge ultimately ordered.
The injunction applies to Facebook and Instagram accounts held by New Mexico minors — WhatsApp is excluded — and runs five years, with Meta filing compliance reports to the court twice a year.
Instagram accounts private by default for users under 18; Facebook limits minors to connecting with other minors by default.
No algorithmic recommendation of underage accounts to adults, and minor accounts excluded from adult search results; unconnected adults cannot message minors.
Like counts hidden by default for minors, visible only with parent or guardian approval; push notifications paused 10 p.m.–7 a.m. daily and 8 a.m.–3 p.m. on school days; total use capped at 90 hours a month across both apps.
An “under-13 prediction model” built within two years, age proof requested from flagged accounts, a 30-day deletion deadline for noncompliant accounts, and deletion of personal data already collected on users under 13.
A reporting portal built with schools and child-safety organizations, new safeguards on AI chatbots interacting with minors, and enhanced review procedures for child-sexual-abuse-material reports.
Torrez has framed the ruling as bigger than New Mexico. Reacting to the March verdict, he put it in industry-wide terms: “I think the jury delivered a message not only to Meta, but to the entire industry, that they expect a whole lot more in terms of creating safe spaces online for kids.”
Maralyn Beck, executive director of the New Mexico Child First Network, called the ruling “a good decision” that protects children who are otherwise growing up “in a digital playground without safeguards or protections.” Meta’s communications chief, Andy Stone, issued the company’s formal response: “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.”
Meta statement on New Mexico verdict: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict 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...”
Wall Street’s reaction was the quietest of all. Meta shares slipped less than half a percent in after-hours trading Thursday, to roughly $589.44 — because $942,000,000is a rounding error against a company that posted about $60 billion in profit in 2025 alone. The ruling changed how Meta has to run two apps for minors in one state. It did not move the stock.
New Mexico is not the only child-safety fight Meta is in — it is simply the first state attorney general to take the company to trial, alone, and win. A separate federal multidistrict litigation covering personal-injury and school-district claims had roughly 2,664 cases pending as of June 2026; a California coordinated proceeding separately consolidates more than 1,600 plaintiffs. But New Mexico’s case stands apart from that sprawl for one reason: it was a stand-alone state action, built on the state’s own undercover investigation rather than aggregated private plaintiffs, and it is the first to carry a state all the way to a judge’s final order — a template every other jurisdiction weighing whether to sue Meta over child safety now has in hand.
A decoy 13-year-old’s profile in 2023 became a $942 million judgment in 2026 — a March jury’s $375,000,000for 75,000 statutory violations, plus a judge’s $567,000,000abatement fund and a five-year rewrite of how Facebook and Instagram treat New Mexico’s minors. Internal Meta documents shown at trial put the daily rate of child exploitation on the company’s own platforms at roughly half a million instances, by a company researcher’s own estimate. Meta says it will appeal, and the company’s stock barely moved on the news — $942,000,000against roughly $60 billion in annual profit is not a number that reaches Wall Street. It is, for now, the largest single verdict any state has won against Meta over how it treats children — and the first built entirely on one state’s own decision to go looking for the problem itself.
Tier 1: the court’s own final judgment (docket D-101-CV-2023-02838), and the New Mexico Department of Justice’s own press releases from filing through verdict. Tier 2: TechCrunch (the outlet that broke this specific figure to our newsroom), the Washington Post, CNBC, CNN, PBS, Forbes, Al Jazeera, Fox Business, NPR, the Albuquerque Journal and Fortune. Tier 3: TheWrap, Malwarebytes and TechPolicy.Press, used for figures corroborated across the Tier 1 and Tier 2 sources above. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is a Democrat; no other elected official or party affiliation is relevant to this corporate-accountability story, and none is otherwise flagged. Truth Social is omitted per this beat’s standard convention for non-partisan business and legal coverage — an extensive search turned up no on-topic post from a relevant account. Meta disputes the ruling and has stated it will appeal to the New Mexico Court of Appeals; nothing on this page should be read as a final, non-appealable determination of liability.