Meta Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is seen on Capitol Hill after a meeting in the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R.S.D., on Thursday, March 26, 2026.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call Inc. | Getty Images
meta was back in court in New Mexico on Monday as part of an ongoing child safety case that could determine whether the company will be deemed a public nuisance and have to spend potentially billions of dollars to repair its products.
The social media company lost the first round of a lawsuit centered on claims brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez. The company is accused of failing to protect children who use its apps from sex offenders and misleading the public about the potential harms of using apps such as Instagram and Facebook.
A New Mexico jury ruled in March that Meth knowingly violated the state’s tort law and must pay $375 million for each violation.
The second stage of the legal process, known as a non-jury trial, will take three weeks to establish whether Meta’s actions caused a public nuisance and warrant possible changes to the product.
Meta said in its quarterly report last week that the New Mexico AG’s office is seeking “approximately $3.7 billion in abatement costs and injunctive relief, including requests for broad changes in the way services are delivered in New Mexico.”
For Mehta and his peers, the trial is one of several this year that experts have characterized as social media’s “Big Tobacco” moments. In the 1990s, tobacco companies were forced to pay billions of dollars for misleading the public about the safety and potential harms of their products, and their power and influence has since declined dramatically.
“It wasn’t an immediate change, but it does mean that the power that Big Tobacco has today is nothing compared to what it was in the 1980s and ’90s,” said Nicholas Guggenberger, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “They no longer have that position.”
Another major social media trial concluded this year took place in Los Angeles in March. Meta and Google The YouTube service has lost a personal injury lawsuit involving a plaintiff who claimed to have been addicted to apps such as Instagram and YouTube as a child.
In New Mexico, the state wants Meta to overhaul its app by implementing features such as effective age verification technology, changing recommendation algorithms that don’t compromise child welfare, and making other fixes that will “fundamentally reshape how Meta can do business in the state,” Torrez said at a press conference last week.
Torrez also said the state is seeking an “independent monitor” to ensure Meta complies with the proposed changes because “we have found that Meta cannot be trusted to regulate itself, comply independently and correct its behavior.”
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that New Mexico’s demands are “technically unrealistic and impossible for any company to meet without ignoring the realities of the Internet.”
“While it is not in Meta’s best interests to do so, if we do not receive a viable resolution to Attorney General Torrez’s request, we may have no choice but to completely remove New Mexico users’ access to our platform,” the spokesperson said.
“First test case”
The jury in the LA trial found that Meta and YouTube’s negligence was a “substantial contributing factor” to the plaintiff’s severe mental health issues. Both companies were ordered to pay a total of $6 million in compensatory and punitive damages, with Meta paying 70% of the fine.
Meta, YouTube, TikTok, snap The company is also involved in a major federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California that includes similar allegations that the companies developed defective apps with features that mislead consumers and encourage unhealthy and addictive behavior in teens and children.
The trial, which involves hundreds of school districts, is scheduled to begin June 15. Adam Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said plaintiffs’ lawyers will likely monitor the New Mexico trial because both cases involve state public nuisance claims.
“This case will not only determine whether New Mexico has significant relief, but it will be kind of the first test case for a theory that is being filed across the country and that all these school districts are relying on in federal court,” Zimmerman said.
The most notable public nuisance case in New Mexico involves the opioid crisis-related trial against Walgreens in Santa Fe in 2022, the state’s deputy chief executive James Grayson said at a news conference last week. The state ultimately reached a $500 million settlement with Walgreens.
“That created or laid the foundation for the use of public nuisances in these types of spaces,” Grayson said. “What we’re really trying to do is show the harm this cause of action does across the state and the real impact on New Mexicans.”
Mehta criticized New Mexico’s effort as a “misguided strategy that ignores the hundreds of other apps that teens use on a daily basis.”
“In any case, we remain committed to providing a safe and age-appropriate experience and have already instituted many of the state-required protections, including 13 safety measures in the last year,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.
Guggenberger said the challenge for plaintiffs will be to “articulate the harm being caused to third parties” in the state as a result of the public nuisance claims. While public nuisance cases have traditionally arisen from the physical world, lawyers are now trying out this legal approach in the digital realm for the first time, he said.
This is another attempt by plaintiffs’ lawyers to apply new legal strategies against big tech companies like Meta, which many critics argue is shielded from liability primarily because of the Section 230 shield of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from lawsuits over third-party content on their respective platforms.
Zimmerman said if Meta and other social media companies continue to lose in court, they could eventually reach the Supreme Court.
Zimmerman said the plaintiffs are trying to say, “This is not a typical Section 230 case about content that should or should not be removed.” Rather, he added, they are saying, “This is a system-wide problem, and the system is kind of defective.”
“And for social media companies, we’re kind of a content broker product,” Zimmerman said.
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