The parent company of Facebook and Instagram will have to pay more than half a billion dollars in fines because a judge found it did not do enough to protect children’s mental health.
The judge in New Mexico levied a penalty of $567 million against Meta in the second phase of a landmark trial, The Associated Press reported. Judge Bryan Biedscheid called Meta a “public nuisance” in the ruling, The Washington Post reported.
Most of the money, $420 million, will be used for treatment services while the remainder will go to pay for awareness, prevention, screening services and other items for the next five years.
Biedscheid wrote, “Meta’s platforms create a public nuisance because their purpose and effect is to optimize engagement, including in ways that are detrimental to teenagers’ health and safety,” the Post reported.
Jurors had already ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties after ruling that the social media juggernaut knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed child sexual exploitation on the platforms.
Investigators acted as children as they tried to prove that the algorithms that run Facebook and Instagram connected youth with abusers, according to the Washington Post.
The second part of the trial focused on the courts forcing Meta to make changes to its addictive features, improve age verification, and prevent child sexual exploitation.
“Today’s decision is a victory for every parent who has worried about what social media is doing to their child and every child who deserves to grow up safer online,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement, the AP reported.
Meta is planning to 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,” the company said in a statement. “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”
Meta is also facing a trial in federal court in California, where the first four of 29 states are suing Meta, claiming the company is contributing to the youth mental health crisis, according to the AP.
Several states filed lawsuits in state court as well.