A New Mexico court ordered Meta on Thursday to pay $567 million in a child safety case, adding to the $375 million fine the same court levied in March and bringing total penalties in the state to $942 million. The judgment also imposes a set of operational changes to how Meta's platforms function for New Mexico users under 18, including hidden Like counts, curfews on push notifications, and hard caps on monthly usage.
Underage users in the state will be limited to 90 hours of platform usage per month, which works out to roughly three hours per day. Push notifications to those accounts must be paused between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. Like counts will be hidden from users under 18 unless a parent or guardian explicitly approves them being shown. The remedies apply to Meta's platforms as they operate inside New Mexico.
The court framed the harms in blunt terms. The judge acknowledged Meta is not the sole driver of the youth mental health crisis in the state but held that its products play a significant role and constitute a public nuisance the company is required to abate.
“Significant numbers of people in New Mexico experience harm from Meta's products due to risks of sexual exploitation, interference with education, and adverse mental health outcomes”— New Mexico Court, Court order
Key facts
- 01A New Mexico judge fined Meta an additional $567M on Thursday, on top of a $375M penalty levied in March, bringing the total to $942M.
- 02The order caps underage users' time on Meta platforms at 90 hours per month, roughly three hours per day.
- 03Push notifications to minors in the state must be paused between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
- 04Like counts must be hidden from users under 18 unless a parent or guardian approves.
- 05Meta says it will appeal the judgment; the ruling follows a March loss in Los Angeles over addictive design patterns.
Meta said it will appeal. The company's response emphasized its ongoing safety work and pushed back on the characterization of its record.
The New Mexico case is one of several fronts Meta is fighting in the United States. A joint lawsuit brought by 33 states was consolidated in a federal court in Oakland, California, and states including Tennessee have filed their own separate actions. The March ruling in Los Angeles also went against Meta, with that court finding the company's design created addictive usage patterns.
“We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts”— Andy Stone, Meta spokesperson
Attorney General Raul Torrez, whose office brought the New Mexico case, cast Thursday's judgment as accountability for choices Meta made over years rather than a single-incident penalty.
The specific remedies matter as much as the dollar figure. Hiding Like counts and capping session time are product-level changes courts have rarely mandated at this granularity, and they run against the engagement mechanics that drive Meta's core advertising business. If the ruling survives appeal, engineering teams will need to gate features based on user age and jurisdiction, a compliance layer Meta has resisted at this level of detail.
“For years, Meta knew its platforms were harming New Mexico's kids, from feeding a youth mental health crisis to connecting predators with children, and it chose engagement and profit over their safety.”— Raul Torrez, New Mexico Attorney General
The $942 million cumulative figure is small next to Meta's quarterly revenue but large as a signal to other state attorneys general weighing similar suits. New Mexico's playbook — pair monetary penalties with prescriptive product changes — gives other states a template that goes beyond fines. That template is now on the table for the 33-state coalition in Oakland and for individual states like Tennessee moving on their own.
The AI angle here is indirect but real. The recommendation systems and ranking models that determine what teenagers see on Meta's platforms are the same class of machine learning systems now being scrutinized across the industry, from YouTube's algorithm to TikTok's For You feed. A court willing to mandate specific interventions on those systems — usage caps, hidden metrics, notification curfews — sets a reference point for how regulators may eventually treat AI-driven personalization more broadly.
Meta's appeal will likely test whether a state court can dictate product design at this level of specificity for a platform that operates nationally. The company has consistently argued that federal law preempts state-level content and design rules, and it has resources to litigate the point for years. For now, though, New Mexico has a judgment on the books that other attorneys general will study closely, and Meta has a bill approaching a billion dollars in a single state.
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