World

New Mexico Meta ruling could reshape teen use of Instagram and Facebook

Published Aug. 8, 2026 1:33 p.m. KST

A security guard stands watch by the Meta sign outside the headquarters of Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Nov. 9, 2022. Reuters-Yonhap

In a landmark ruling against Meta, a New Mexico judge compared the company's social media platforms to factories and said the psychological harm caused to children using Facebook and Instagram could be viewed as pollution from those operations.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid on Thursday fined the company $567 million, while also ordering steps intended to address what he described as the platforms' harmful byproducts. The measures include a monthly limit of 90 hours for users under 18, restrictions on AI chatbots and mandatory warnings on the platforms.

How easily those measures can be put into practice, and how effective they may be in protecting young users from mental health harms, remains unclear. The changes would apply only to children in New Mexico, Meta has no deadline to implement them and the company has said it will appeal.

Even so, the ruling may offer a path forward for other legal battles across the United States as Meta faces growing legal, regulatory and public pressure to do more to protect young users. The case is part of a broader wave of litigation: dozens of states have filed similar lawsuits against Meta, and in 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory warning that social media presents a "profound risk" to youth mental health, urging technology companies and policymakers to take action.

The decision came in the second phase of a trial in a lawsuit filed by the state of New Mexico against the social media company. The new penalty adds to the $375 million in civil penalties jurors ordered against Meta in March after finding that the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

Meta said in a statement Thursday that it works to keep people safe on its platforms and has been transparent about the difficulties 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," the company said.

Court-ordered measures face implementation hurdles

Many of the reforms ordered by Biedscheid depend on strong age-verification systems. The ruling says Meta must improve its age assurance models and tools in New Mexico and proactively ask for proof of age for users it knows or estimates to be under 13.

What that proof might look like is not clear.

"Age verification can be done well in a privacy-protective way, but it is not easy," said Peter Ormerod, an associate professor of law at Villanova University.

Federal children's privacy laws also limit how Meta can apply age-verification tools to children under 13. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act prevents the court from ordering Meta to request that children submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes.

Identifying which users are in New Mexico and therefore covered by the court-ordered protections could also be difficult. Ormerod said Meta could likely determine whether a user is accessing the platform from an IP address associated with New Mexico, a solution "that works reasonably well enough."

Meta already has several safety tools in place. Instagram Teen Accounts, for example, include built-in protections that limit who can contact teens and what content they can see, while also giving parents the ability to set time limits.

Brooke Istook, president and chief strategy officer at the advocacy group Heat Initiative, said she welcomed the fact that the reforms will be supervised by the court.

"Now, we will have someone in an official capacity checking the homework of these companies," she said. "The fact that we have the court now involved, they're able to evaluate how they're implemented, whether or not they're effective and whether or not they are actually working to keep kids safe online."

Experts say some of the most harmful features were left untouched

Meta critics argue that some of the most recognizable and potentially harmful design elements of Instagram and Facebook were not addressed by the ruling.

Features such as autoplay, infinite scroll and algorithmic content recommendations have been central to legal arguments that social media platforms are built to be addictive. But Biedscheid wrote in his ruling that those features are used across the social media industry on other platforms, and that restricting Meta's features while leaving competitors' versions untouched would unfairly harm the company.

That was disappointing to Sophia Choukas-Bradley, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh.

"Those design features have played a very important role in what leads to problematic use of social media by adolescents and, in turn, mental health problems," Choukas-Bradley said.

Still, she supported several of the ruling's safety measures, especially the requirement that "like counts" on the apps be hidden by default on minors' accounts unless a parent or guardian changes the setting. She also backed a measure intended to create a stronger barrier between children and "unconnected" adults on the platforms. Meta would not be able to recommend a child's account to an adult's account, and adults who are not "friends" or followers of a minor's account would be barred from messaging the child.

"There are just too many documented cases of sextortion, sexploitation and sex trafficking that start in the online context for us to ignore this any longer," Choukas-Bradley said.

Sonia Livingstone, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, said it remains unclear which social media features are most harmful to children's mental health. However, she said there is substantial evidence that more vulnerable children are more susceptible to the effects of platform design.

"Tested one by one, the evidence for each design feature will be weaker, as it is the combination of features that really will make the difference for children's outcomes," said Livingstone, who leads the Digital Futures for Children research center.

Some hope the ruling pushes broader regulation

Because the measures in the order apply only to users in New Mexico, experts say piecemeal rulings and inconsistent state laws could create new problems. States including Utah, Florida, Arkansas and Texas have passed laws restricting minors' social media access, though some have faced court challenges on First Amendment grounds.

"It really needs to be uniform at the congressional level, it causes all sorts of problems," said Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers. "It just doesn't make sense in today's era of technology."

Some advocates hope similar rulings in other states could push Congress to act and lead to new federal legislation. Federal efforts to strengthen children's online safety laws, including proposals to modernize COPPA and pass standalone measures like the Kids Online Safety Act, have repeatedly stalled despite bipartisan support.

For parents in New Mexico, the ruling could change how they talk with their teenagers about social media use. Heather Statum, an Albuquerque mother of a 13-year-old girl, said her daughter is constantly asking for access to different social media platforms.

Statum said she has heard warnings about predators on Instagram or Snapchat. She is also aware that discussions of suicide and other mental health issues are common online among her daughter's peers, and she worries about her child being exposed to disturbing content.

"The stuff (social media companies) have in place to protect them, I don't think any of it actually works," Statum said. "It does cause major problems between us because she thinks that I'm too strict."

Statum said the platform-level changes ordered by the court could help promote safer use, but she added that balancing safety and freedom will be difficult. She said educating children about the dangers is the best path forward.