ALBUQUERQUE – A New Mexico judge has ruled that teenagers on Meta’s platforms deserve state-funded protection from the companies that built them, ordering Meta to pay $567 million and restructure how Facebook and Instagram operate for users under eighteen.
The judgment, issued Thursday by New Mexico District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid, directs Meta to fund a five-year abatement plan addressing harms to young users on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. The ruling is the second major financial blow against the company in New Mexico in under five months and brings the state’s total recovery against Meta to $942 million.
The New Mexico action began in 2023, when Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed suit alleging that Meta had designed its platforms to be addictive, failed to protect children from sexual exploitation, and misled the public about safety measures on its apps. A jury awarded the state $375 million in March 2026, part of a wave of coordinated social media addiction trials that also saw Meta and YouTube found liable for addictive platform design in a separate Los Angeles proceeding. Thursday’s ruling stacks $567 million in additional remediation costs on top of that figure.
The abatement order requires Meta to implement monthly usage limits for teen accounts on Facebook and Instagram, restrict certain notifications, strengthen controls on adult contact with minors, introduce safeguards on AI-powered chatbot interactions with young users, and improve its procedures for reporting child sexual abuse material. According to Fox Business, the company has five years to implement those changes.
Torrez framed the case as one about engineering, not speech. Meta, he argued, deliberately constructed systems to maximize the time teenagers spend on its platforms, creating foreseeable risk of psychological harm and exposure to predatory behavior. The suit also alleged that Meta had misled users about the safety of its products. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online,” the company said after the ruling, and announced plans to appeal.
The remedy Judge Biedscheid imposed distinguishes this judgment from most prior social media litigation. Courts that awarded damages in related cases gave money to compensate specific victims. The New Mexico abatement order does something different: it demands that Meta change how its platforms are built, for an entire class of users, in a specific state, on a court-mandated schedule. That structural demand, if upheld on appeal, creates a template other state attorneys general will almost certainly study.
For years, technology companies faced those claims from behind Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which broadly shields platforms from liability tied to what users post or see. New Mexico’s case, like the cases before it, moved around that protection by focusing on design rather than content. Whether a platform optimizes engagement among fourteen-year-olds is a question about how the product was built, not what anyone said on it. Courts have shown an increasing willingness to treat the distinction as meaningful.
Meta is managing parallel legal exposure across its major apps. Instagram drew widespread criticism last year after the company removed end-to-end encryption from direct messages, a decision privacy advocates argued exposed hundreds of millions of users to expanded data collection. Meanwhile, the company’s WhatsApp platform is at the center of a separate federal contempt action involving NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, which was found to have continued targeting WhatsApp users after a federal court ordered NSO to stop. The convergence of those cases complicates any single narrative Meta might offer about its approach to user protection.
The enforcement mechanics for the New Mexico abatement plan remain undefined. How the state will measure whether Meta has implemented monthly usage limits for teen accounts, what auditing process will apply to AI chatbot safeguards, and what penalties will follow if the company misses compliance milestones have not been specified publicly. The $567 million will go toward New Mexico’s abatement program, but the structure of that program and the agencies that will administer it have not been announced.
Meta’s business model complicates the picture further. The company’s advertising revenue depends on sustained user engagement: the longer teenagers use Facebook and Instagram, the more behavioral data accumulates and the more precisely targeted advertising can be sold. Court-ordered usage limits do not merely alter a product feature for a minority demographic. They introduce a legal mechanism capable of constraining the economic logic of engagement maximization that has driven the industry’s growth for two decades.
What that constraint ultimately looks like in practice will depend on appeal courts, compliance timelines, and the willingness of state and federal judges to enforce structural remedies against platforms operating at global scale. AG Torrez has won a large number. Whether New Mexico can turn it into lasting change to how teenagers experience social media is the question the ruling leaves open.
