A US court has handed Meta another costly legal blow after finding the social media giant responsible for failing to protect children from harm on its platforms, ordering the company to pay an extra $567 million into a fund aimed at addressing the damage caused to young users.
The latest ruling, delivered on Thursday by Judge Bryan Biedscheid in New Mexico, raises the total amount Meta has been ordered to pay in the case to $942 million after an earlier award of $375 million.
In his decision, the judge said Meta had created a "public nuisance" through the way its platforms exposed children to harmful content and online predators. He compared the company to a factory, saying its platforms generate advertising and content as products while "the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated".
The ruling marks the biggest financial penalty Meta has faced over child safety and is also believed to be the first time a social media company has been declared a public nuisance by a court.
Meta, which owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads, said it would challenge the ruling.
"We disagree with the ruling and will appeal."
"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."
The company had also said it planned to appeal the earlier $375 million judgment, which marked the first successful lawsuit by a US state against Meta over child safety concerns.
The case began in 2023 after New Mexico sued the company, arguing that its platforms placed children at risk by exposing them to sexually explicit material and allowing contact with sexual predators.
During the first stage of the trial, the court found that Meta repeatedly breached New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act after its recommendation algorithms directed young users toward harmful content and dangerous contacts.
Recommendation algorithms are the systems Meta uses to decide what content users see on its platforms.
In the second stage of the case, Judge Biedscheid ruled that the impact of Meta's actions had become so widespread that it met the legal definition of a public nuisance because it affected the health and safety of the wider community.
"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.
Under the order, Meta must establish a fund that will finance efforts to reduce the effects of the harm caused by its platforms.
Out of the total amount, $420 million will support treatment and recovery programmes through clinical and behavioural health services for children affected by the platforms.
The remaining money will help pay for education, awareness and prevention programmes, including training for teachers and healthcare professionals on how to identify and respond to social media-related harm involving children.
The court also directed Meta to introduce a series of new safety measures. These include making sure accounts belonging to users under the age of 18 are not recommended to adults, blocking adults from sending messages to underage users, banning the sending or receiving of nude images by underage users and introducing a "1-strike policy for adult users who engage in child sexual exploitation."
The ruling further requires the company to remove visible "like" counts for users under 18, stop push notifications between 10:00 pm and 7:00 am each day and also during school hours from 8:00 am to 3:00 pm on school days.
Meta must also introduce a compulsory monthly usage limit of 90 hours across Instagram and Facebook for users under the age of 18, averaging about three hours a day.
The New Mexico case is one of several legal challenges facing the company in the United States. Meta is currently defending thousands of similar lawsuits over child safety claims and earlier this year also lost another case in Los Angeles involving related allegations.
The legal pressure is expected to continue next week when another major trial begins in California, where attorneys general from nearly three dozen US states accuse Meta of violating child privacy laws.