Court orders Instagram and Facebook's Meta to pay $567M to address kids'
mental health online
[August 07, 2026] By
BARBARA ORTUTAY and WUFEI YU
A New Mexico court has ordered Instagram and Facebook parent company
Meta to pay $567 million to address harms to young people from its
platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid said in a ruling late Thursday that the bulk of
the money — $420 million — will be used for treatment services for young
people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening
services and other costs over the next five years.
The new penalty is in addition to the $375 million in civil penalties
that jurors ordered against Meta in March after determining the company
knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew
about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. In the second phase,
prosecutors asked the judge to impose fundamental changes at Meta aimed
at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and
preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings
and closer oversight.
The total amount Meta is responsible for — $942 million — is a small
fraction of of its annual profit, which was about $60 billion in 2025.
Investors seemed to shrug off the New Mexico ruling in after-hours
trading Thursday, sending Meta’s stock down less than half a percent to
$589.44.
Still, the ruling is another setback for Meta, which faces an avalanche
of lawsuits from thousands of families of children harmed by social
media.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said it sends an unmistakable
message that companies will be held accountable when their product
designs knowingly put children at risk.
“Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about
what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves
to grow up safer online,” he said in a statement.
Meta vowed 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 company said in a statement. "We remain
confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to
defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
The look of Meta's platforms could change
The judge ordered Facebook and Instagram to build banner and
informational screens to clearly explain its protection features, best
practices and tools to address inappropriate comment, for example, and
display them regularly. Those changes and an educational campaign in New
Mexico would be subject to review by the state.
The court said federal children’s privacy laws prevent Meta from
applying age-verification tools to children under 13. The Children’s
Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, means it cannot order Meta to
request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online,
even for age verification purposes.
The court also noted that ordering verification of children’s ages only
for Meta and not other social media companies would be “inequitable and
unduly injurious” to the company.
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A Meta logo is shown on a video screen at LlamaCon 2025, an AI
developer conference, in Menlo Park, Calif., April 29, 2025. (AP
Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)
 Instead, the court ordered Meta to
continue to improve its age assurance tools in New Mexico, which
include using artificial intelligence to determine people’s age
based on signals such as who their friends are and what types of
content they post and consume. Meta must also attempt to develop a
dedicated “under-13-years-of-age prediction model” in the next two
years.
Additionally, Meta should also request proof of age for Instagram
and Facebook users in New Mexico it estimates to be under 13. If it
determines a user to be under 13, or under 18 but without being able
to estimate a specific age, Meta must treat the user as under 13 or
under 18 until the user verifies their age.
The company must also partner with schools or a child safety
organization to create a reporting portal where school staff can
flag users who may be under 13. And it must delete personal
information it has collected on users under 13. The court also
ordered Meta to report on its progress twice a year on how it’s
complying with the abatement measures.
Meta is gearing up for a trial this month in California amid
flood of lawsuits
Meta is also gearing up for a trial later this month in federal
court in Oakland, California. Here, Meta will face the first four of
29 states that sued it in a federal multi-district lawsuit filed in
2023 for contributing to the youth mental health crisis by knowingly
designing features on Instagram and Facebook that addict children to
its platforms.
Eight states, including Tennessee, where a trial is currently
ongoing, filed lawsuits in their own state courts.
And late last month, Meta, along with TikTok, Snap and Google’s
YouTube, were sued by the families of four teenagers who died by
suicide over what they describe as “years of escalating harms” from
using their platforms that eventually resulted in their deaths.
What comes out of New Mexico is the first of many dominoes that will
fall for Meta, said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor at
Northeastern University focusing on social media and cybersecurity.
“America is not going to pass a law that bans social media," Edelson
said. "But if companies like Meta know they’re causing harm to users
by product design, the states are finally finding a way to rein this
in.”
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