Meta loses child safety trial in New Mexico
March 26, 2026
Summary fom PA Unplugged:
A jury in New Mexico found that Meta willfully violated the state’s consumer protections laws and misled users about the safety of its platforms, ordering the company to pay $375 million in damages.
The lawsuit, brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez in 2023, followed an undercover investigation in which Meta platforms allegedly inundated a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl with “images and targeted solicitations” from child abusers.
The suit in New Mexico is the first to reach trial in a series of social media lawsuits. Jurors are still deliberating over a separate trial in Los Angeles over whether Meta and YouTube knew the design of their platforms inflicted harm on their younger users. TikTok and Snap settled in that case rather than risking a trial.
Why we’re following: Social platforms have long been able to avoid liability in cases where users experience harms by citing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields them from the consequences of what other users post. The New Mexico case represents an effort to target the design of the system rather than the individual posts. It’s not any one Instagram Reel that causes you to develop an eating disorder, this argument goes; it’s that Meta’s recommendation algorithms see that you enjoy watching them and serve you more of them (including via push notifications) until you do.
This was a relatively fringe legal theory until recently. The New Mexico verdict suggests it may be a winner — which has huge implications for liability for other platforms that host user-generated content.
What people are saying: “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone wrote on X. “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content. We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”
Stone also noted that the damages are “just a fraction of what the State sought.”
While the New Mexico trial deals with a slightly different issue than the Los Angeles one, the “jury finding for the state across the board is, however, a big moment for the crowd arguing that product liability offers a way around Section 230,” Reuters’ Meta reporter Jeff Horwitz wrote.
