SANTE FE, N.M.—In the latest ruling in an online child safety case heard at a state court in New Mexico, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram was ordered late Thursday to pay nearly $1 billion to resolve claims that it was a "significant contributor" to the teen mental health crisis sweeping the state and the wider United States.
The company, Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms, is now on the hook for a whopping $942 million in fines for creating a so-called “public nuisance” related to how it handled child safety. Meta was ordered by the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico to pay $567 million in an effort to establish an abatement fund to pay for awareness and prevention measures targeted at teenagers and young people who report mental health and physical injury from excessive and problematic social media usage.
This new penalty is in addition to the $375 million in state civil penalties that jurors in the case, which Democratic New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez originally brought, ordered Meta to pay.
Jurors ruled that Meta knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed it. In the second phase of the litigation, the prosecutors urged the judge to require Meta to adopt age-appropriate designs, minimize addiction, improve age verification and work to prevent child sexual exploitation.
Attorney General Torrez expressed praise for the court order, noting, "For the first time, a court has ruled that a social media giant can be held liable for building products that endanger children, and has ordered the structural changes needed to fix it. New Mexico led the way in the courtroom."
Torrez added, "It is a blueprint other states, and other countries confronting this same crisis, can now follow. But a courtroom win in one state cannot be the only line of defense for children everywhere. Every legislature, and Congress, needs to finish what this court started.”
A spokesperson for Meta promised that the company intends to 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," the spokesperson said. "We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts."
AVN previously covered the case, noting its landmark nature. This is a major bellwether case establishing, for the first time in a U.S. court, that social media addiction is a recognized concept by the legal system, despite a lack of scientific consensus. Social media addiction is not a recognized diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5), which is compiled and published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA).
Rather, medical practitioners attribute established criteria for diagnosing other compulsions and problematic use behaviors. According to the association, proposed diagnoses under the category of technology addiction are typically products of behavioral dysfunction that is exacerbated by underlying diagnoses of anxiety, depression and other related mental health disorders.