A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay another $567m on Thursday in a child safety case, lifting the total penalty to $942m and putting the company under its largest fine yet over harm to children. Judge Bryan Biedscheid said the money must go into a fund aimed at reducing future harms, and he described Meta as a public nuisance akin to air pollution.
The ruling lands because it turns a lawsuit about online safety into a financial penalty with a direct purpose. Biedscheid said Meta did not just host harmful content on Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads; he found the company failed to warn the public about dangers its platforms posed to children, then ordered the new payment to support future harm reduction rather than simply punish the past. The case began in 2023, when state attorneys argued that Meta should be held liable for the way its platforms exposed children to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.
The court had already found in the first phase of the trial that Meta repeatedly violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, and that its recommendation algorithms steered young users toward harmful content and contacts. In the second phase, Biedscheid said those harms reached the level of public nuisance, a finding he compared to pollution because, in his view, the damage spread beyond individual users and into the wider public. That matters now because Thursday's ruling adds $567m to the $375m Meta was already ordered to pay, and it arrives as the company faces wider legal pressure after losing a landmark case in Los Angeles earlier this year over addictive platforms.
Meta said it disagreed with the ruling and would appeal. A company spokesman said Meta works hard to keep people safe, has been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content, and remains confident in its record of protecting teens online. But the new order leaves the company with a $942m bill in New Mexico alone, and the appeal now becomes the next test of whether that fund will stand and how much of the penalty will ultimately survive.
