A New Mexico state court jury on Tuesday found Meta Inc. liable for nearly $400 million in civil damages after the state attorney general accused the Facebook and Instagram companies of protecting children who use their apps from child predators.
The civil trial, which began with opening arguments in Santa Fe last month, centered on allegations that Meta violated state consumer protection laws and misled residents about the safety of apps like Facebook and Instagram. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres filed charges against Meta in 2023 following a sting involving the creation of fake social media profiles for 13-year-old girls. He previously told CNBC that he was “just inundated with images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.
Deliberations began Monday, with jurors tasked with deciding for or against Mehta. The jury found that Meta knowingly violated the state’s tort law and determined that Meta should pay $375 million in damages based on the number of violations.
In her closing statement, New Mexico attorney Linda Singer urged jurors to impose civil penalties against Meth that could exceed $2 billion.
A Meta spokesperson said: “We respectfully disagree with this ruling and intend to appeal.” “We work diligently to keep people safe on our platform, and we are clear in our challenge to identify and remove malicious actors and harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously and remain confident in our track record of protecting teens online.”
Mehta previously denied New Mexico’s claims and said the state is “focused on demonstrating our long-standing commitment to supporting youth.”
“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for all the children and families who paid the price for Mehta’s choice to put profit over the safety of his children,” Torres said in a statement. “Meta executives knew their products were harmful to children, ignored warnings from their own employees and lied to the public about what they knew. Today, jurors joined families, educators and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
When the second phase of New Mexico’s non-jury trial begins on May 4, a judge will decide whether meth caused a public nuisance and whether public programs aimed at addressing the alleged harm should be funded. Lawyers for the state are asking Meta to implement changes to its app and operations, including “enforcing effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that protect against malicious actors.”
During the trial, New Mexico prosecutors unveiled legal filings detailing internal messages from Meta employees discussing how CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 2019 announcement that Facebook Messenger would be end-to-end encrypted by default would impact the company’s ability to disclose approximately 7.5 million child sexual abuse material reports to law enforcement.
In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, before the verdict was announced, Torrez discussed Meta’s claims that prosecutors had cherry-picked certain materials to paint an unfair picture about the company and that Meta was updating various apps with safety features.
Torres said he didn’t think the jury would be “convinced that he did everything he could or should have done and should be held accountable for it.”
“One of the things I’m really focused on is how can we change the design features of these products, at least within the state of New Mexico, so that we can create standards that can be modeled around the rest of the country and, frankly, around the world,” Torrez said on the sideline of the Common Sense Summit in San Francisco.
Torrez said a similar child exploitation case filed by his office in 2024 against Snapp is still in the discovery phase, and that his team was “able to survive the Section 230 claims” in both the Mehta and Snapp cases. The tech industry has argued that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects them from liability for content shared on their services, prompting prosecutors to try a new legal strategy that focuses instead on app design.
Regarding Mehta’s criticism that prosecutors are seizing certain corporate documents and related materials, Torrez said, “What’s interesting is that they’re accusing us of doing that, but all we’re doing is showing the world what they knew behind closed doors and didn’t want to tell their users.”
The New Mexico case is one of several social media-related trials taking place this year, and experts have compared it to the Big Tobacco case of the 1990s, in part because of allegations that the company misled the public about the safety and potential harms of its products.
Juror in another personal injury trial involving meth and meth Google YouTube’s case has been pending in Los Angeles Superior Court since last Friday. Both companies are accused of misleading the public about the safety and design of their respective apps. The jury will have to determine whether one or both of the companies implemented certain design features that led to the emotional distress of the plaintiff, who claims to have become addicted to social media apps as a minor.
A separate federal trial in the Northern District of California is scheduled to begin later this year. Multiple school districts and parents across the country claim that the practices and apps of Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap have had negative mental health effects on teens and children.
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