A New Mexico state court has ordered Meta Platforms to pay an additional $567 million and undertake five years of court-supervised changes to Facebook and Instagram, bringing the company’s total financial exposure in a landmark child-safety case to $942 million.

The final judgment, entered August 6 and announced by the New Mexico Department of Justice on August 7, follows a two-stage proceeding in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County. A jury previously imposed $375 million in civil penalties after finding 75,000 violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act. Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid then presided over a bench trial addressing the state’s separate contention that Meta’s platforms created a public nuisance.

Biedscheid concluded that Facebook and Instagram were a significant contributing factor to New Mexico’s youth mental-health crisis and imposed a detailed abatement program. The ruling requires financial support for treatment and prevention services while also placing operational restrictions on Meta’s products for young users in the state.

The $567 million payment is structured as an abatement fund rather than an additional conventional civil penalty. The court allocated $420 million for treatment services, $90 million for screening and assessment, $33 million for awareness and prevention, $15 million for referral and care coordination, and $9 million for implementation, continuous quality improvement and evaluation.

Spending from the fund is limited to a five-year period. The court rejected a proposed 15-year program, finding that such a duration would extend beyond the relief necessary to address existing harm and current risks. It also reduced the amount sought by the state after acknowledging that social-media companies other than Meta share responsibility for problems affecting young users.

The treatment allocation represents nearly three-quarters of the fund and is intended to expand New Mexico’s capacity to respond to depression, anxiety, self-harm, eating disorders and other conditions affecting adolescents. Evidence considered by the court described a state behavioral-health system unable to meet growing demand, particularly in schools and communities with limited access to specialists.

The judgment cited state data showing that persistent sadness or hopelessness among New Mexico high-school students was 16% higher in 2023 than in 2013. It also noted evidence that major depressive episodes among young people in the state more than doubled between the 2013-2014 and 2022-2023 periods. Suicide was either the leading or second-leading cause of death among New Mexico adolescents in recent years, according to findings included in the ruling.

The court recognized that youth mental health is shaped by numerous factors, including family circumstances, poverty, violence, neighborhood conditions and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It nevertheless found that Meta’s platforms made a meaningful contribution to the broader crisis through engagement-oriented design features and the scale of their use among children.

Under the order, Meta must limit accounts belonging to users under 18 to no more than 90 hours of combined Facebook and Instagram use each month. That threshold is equivalent to an average of approximately three hours a day, although the text of the order establishes a cumulative monthly limit rather than a daily cap.

Meta must also disable push notifications to known or estimated users under 18 between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. every day. During the academic year, notifications must additionally be disabled between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays. The court allowed exceptions for communications from connected users and urgent targeted messages, including security or hazard alerts.

Public “like” counts must be hidden by default on accounts identified as belonging to minors. A user under 18 may override that setting only with permission from a parent or guardian. The requirement is intended to reduce the psychological pressure associated with public measures of approval without removing the underlying content or preventing users from interacting with it.

The court declined to order direct changes to Meta’s recommendation algorithms, infinite scroll or autoplay. Although it found that those features can combine with notifications and visible engagement metrics to encourage problematic use, Biedscheid said restrictions on content presentation could implicate the First Amendment and Section 230 of the federal Communications Decency Act. The judge also expressed concern that imposing such restrictions on Meta alone, when similar features are widely used across the industry, could place the company at an unreasonable competitive disadvantage.

That limitation makes the judgment narrower than some of the remedies New Mexico requested. Rather than directing the mechanics of recommendation systems, the order concentrates on disclosures, time controls, notifications, privacy settings and safety procedures that the court considered more objectively measurable and less directly connected to the presentation of third-party content.

Section 230 remains central to the broader legal significance of the case. The federal statute generally protects online services from being treated as the publisher or speaker of content supplied by users. New Mexico argued that its claims targeted Meta’s own product design, business conduct and representations about platform safety, not merely its decisions to host or remove individual posts.

The court rejected Meta’s position that Section 230 barred the public-nuisance claim in its entirety. At the same time, its refusal to regulate recommendation algorithms illustrates the boundary the judge drew between actionable company conduct and measures that could interfere more directly with content distribution. That distinction is likely to receive close scrutiny during an appeal and in other state lawsuits advancing product-design theories.

The judgment also addresses how Meta identifies young users. The company must continue and strengthen age-assurance measures for New Mexico accounts, including systems that estimate age from available information. However, the court stopped short of requiring universal identity-based age verification.

Biedscheid said the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act constrained the available judicial remedies because gathering additional information from users believed to be under 13 can itself trigger legal restrictions. The court also characterized a sweeping mandatory age-verification regime as a policy decision more appropriately handled by lawmakers and executive agencies.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said he would seek legislation requiring age verification for social-media platforms operating in the state. He also called for an overhaul of New Mexico’s consumer-protection laws and broader congressional action. Any such legislation would face questions over privacy, data retention, constitutional protections and the technical reliability of determining both a user’s age and location.

The existing order requires Meta to preserve and strengthen protections associated with its Teen Accounts. It mandates default privacy safeguards, measures intended to prevent minors from sending or receiving nude images that violate company policy, and stricter enforcement against adults engaged in sexual exploitation or sextortion.

The court directed Meta to improve coordination with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and New Mexico law enforcement. Meta must maintain a designated contact for investigators working on internet crimes against children and finance semiannual training for relevant state and federal law-enforcement personnel.

Within 30 days of the judgment, Meta must consult the national center about possible improvements to its CyberTip reporting system. The order requires expedited human review of reports involving newly identified child sexual abuse material posted by or shared with users in New Mexico before those reports are referred to the center. Meta must also seek input before introducing changes to reporting systems affecting New Mexico cases.

Other requirements include prominent risk disclosures within Meta’s platforms and educational materials for adolescents, parents, teachers and healthcare professionals. The court emphasized that information should be displayed in a visible, forward-facing manner rather than placed in lengthy policy documents or on pages users are unlikely to consult.

Meta must support a statewide public-awareness campaign and provide resources to help schools identify and report platform-related concerns. The order treats education as a central component of abatement because the jury’s earlier consumer-protection findings centered on representations and omissions concerning the risks faced by minors.

The March verdict followed a jury trial that began in February. Jurors found that Meta committed 75,000 violations of the state Unfair Practices Act and assessed the statutory maximum of $5,000 for each violation, producing the $375 million penalty. The second phase, conducted before the judge in May, considered the public-nuisance claim and appropriate equitable relief.

The state filed the underlying case in December 2023 after investigating online solicitation, child sexual exploitation and other risks on Meta’s services. New Mexico relied on testimony from educators, law-enforcement officials, medical specialists, industry experts and former Meta employees, as well as internal company documents introduced during the litigation.

The final order requires Meta to submit written compliance reports to the court and the state by June 30 and December 31 during the five-year abatement period. Those reports must address progress on each mandated measure and will be filed publicly in the case. The judge may hold status hearings at either party’s request or on the court’s own initiative.

The court did not initially appoint an independent child-safety monitor, finding that the proposed monitoring standards were not sufficiently defined. It retained authority to appoint a monitor or special master if recurring compliance disputes make direct court supervision unduly burdensome. New Mexico’s Department of Justice may also delegate review of particular requirements to agencies with relevant expertise.

Meta has said it disagrees with the ruling and intends to appeal. The company maintains that it has invested in protections for younger users and argues that parents, app stores and the wider industry should share responsibility for age verification and online safety. An appeal could challenge the public-nuisance theory, the scale and structure of the abatement fund, individual product requirements and the treatment of federal statutory and constitutional protections.

The prospect of appellate proceedings means the eventual payment timetable and implementation schedule could change. Courts may be asked to stay some or all of the judgment while the challenge proceeds. The final financial effect will depend on whether the award and injunctive provisions are upheld, reduced, modified or reversed.

For investors, $942 million is material but manageable relative to Meta’s overall financial scale. The broader exposure lies in whether the legal reasoning is adopted elsewhere. A ruling that permits states to seek both monetary abatement and structural product changes could raise compliance costs well beyond New Mexico, particularly if other jurisdictions obtain different or conflicting requirements.

More than 30 states have pursued claims concerning Meta’s treatment of young users, while families and school districts have brought separate litigation against social-media companies. The New Mexico decision does not control those cases, but plaintiffs are likely to examine its findings, evidentiary framework and distinction between platform design and third-party content.

State-by-state regulation could require social-media operators to determine where users are located, apply different settings by jurisdiction and document compliance under multiple legal regimes. Age-assurance errors would create additional complications: adults could be subjected to youth restrictions, while minors misclassified as adults could remain outside the safeguards.

The ruling therefore reaches beyond a single damages figure. It provides a detailed judicial model for linking consumer-protection findings, public-health evidence, an abatement fund and platform-level remedies. It also exposes the limits of that model, particularly where requested controls intersect with content presentation, federal privacy rules or constitutional protections.

New Mexico officials characterize the judgment as a blueprint for holding technology companies accountable for harms attributed to their products. Meta’s planned appeal will test that proposition. Until appellate courts address the decision, the case stands as one of the most consequential state judgments to combine financial liability for alleged youth harms with ongoing supervision of how a major social-media company designs and operates its services.