A New Mexico jury found Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, liable for the harm, including child sexual exploitation, perpetrated on its platforms, reports The Guardian. The jury has ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages in what New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torres called “a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety.” Torres continued, “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
The issues have been ongoing for Meta for some time now. The lawsuit was filed in 2023, and earlier that same year, The Guardian published an investigation into how Facebook and Instagram are used for child sex trafficking. Meta introduced teen accounts in 2024, which aimed to restrict what content underage users see on their feeds and restrict the hours they could use the account. However, in depositions for the New Mexico case, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that some criminal activity on Meta’s platforms was basically inevitable and that they shouldn’t be held to a standard of perfection.
The court also heard an argument that Meta’s encrypted messages blocked evidence from the case, and the state seeks design changes for “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors.” Meta already announced that it will end end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs in May, which is controversial for good reason. As an article in Wired pointed out a few days ago, removing encryption is not good for privacy, nor does it really seem like it does much to stop online child abuse.
Meta was ordered to pay the maximum penalty, which was $5,000 per violation, for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. This is the first jury trial that Meta has faced over this issue, but it certainly will not be the last. The company is also on trial in Los Angeles for a similar case, wherein prosecutors allege that Meta intentionally designed its platforms to be addictive, harming minors’ mental health in the process. Meta plans to appeal New Mexico’s ruling.
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