A US judge in New Mexico on Thursday ordered Meta to pay another $567m (£421m) for its failure to warn the public about dangers its platforms posed to children, marking the largest ruling against the company over child safety.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid said the social media giant is a “public nuisance” akin to air pollution and that it must put the money in a fund aimed at reducing future harms.
The ruling is in addition to $375m in fines Meta was already ordered to pay in the case, for a total of $942m.
Judge Biedscheid compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and content as its product and “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated”.
Meta, which owns and operates Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads, has been contacted by the BBC for comment.
Regarding the earlier $375m verdict against in the case, Meta had said it intended to appeal the ruling. It was the first time that a state had successfully sued Meta over child safety issues.
The case stems from a 2023 lawsuit brought by attorneys for the State of New Mexico, arguing Meta should be held liable for the way in which its platforms endangered children and exposed them to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.
In the first phase of the trial, Meta was found to have repeatedly violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act as its recommendation algorithms essentially “steered” young users toward harmful content and contacts.
Recommendation algorithms are the tools that Meta uses to automatically curate the content a user sees on its platforms.
In ruling on this second phase of the trial, Judge Biedscheid found that Meta’s harms reached the level of “public nuisance”, or an issue of health and safety that has become so widespread it is negatively impacting a general public.
In addition to being the largest fine Meta has received over child safety issues, the ruling also appears to be the first time that a social media company has been deemed a public nuisance.
“Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms and, instead, migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world and create a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families and schools, as well as hospitals and law enforcement,” the judge wrote.
