A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million on Thursday, adding to the $375 million the company was assessed in March in the same state lawsuit over social media harms to minors. The combined penalty now stands at $942 million. Meta has said it will appeal, so the figure is not final and could still change on review.
The order goes beyond money. The judge directed Meta to strip Like counts from view for users under 18 unless a parent or guardian opts in, to hold back push notifications to minors in the state overnight, from 10 at night until 7 in the morning, and to cap their monthly platform time at 90 hours, roughly three hours a day. Those are operational constraints on the product, not just a fine Meta can absorb and move past.
That distinction matters more than the dollar figure. Meta’s annual revenue runs well into the hundreds of billions, so a payment under $1 billion does not by itself change incentives at the company. What can change incentives is a legal standard: a finding that specific design choices, like counts, notification timing, unlimited engagement, amount to a public nuisance a state can force a company to abate. Based on the order, that is what happened here. The judge described Meta’s conduct in New Mexico as a “public nuisance” and required the company to abate it, language that points to an ongoing duty rather than a one-time payment.
That framing gives other states a template, not just a number to cite. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said the judgment “forces real changes to how Meta operates in New Mexico.” The remedies imposed here (notification curfews, usage caps, minor-specific defaults) are the kind of relief that a 33-state coalition, whose suit against Meta sits before a federal judge in Oakland, and Tennessee in its own separate case, could seek to replicate rather than invent from scratch.
Meta disputes the underlying findings. Spokesperson Andy Stone said the company remains confident in its record on teen safety and will keep defending itself against claims he described as misrepresenting the facts. A Los Angeles court reached a similar conclusion back in March, ruling against Meta over addictive design patterns, giving the company two adverse outcomes on related claims within months of each other.
The order does not close the matter. An appeal could narrow or overturn both the fine and the behavioral requirements, and nothing in the ruling binds courts outside New Mexico. For operators tracking the broader regulatory picture, the figure to watch is not $942 million. It is whether appellate courts uphold the public nuisance theory and the specific product mandates, because that outcome would tell other state attorneys general whether a courtroom order, not a settlement, can reach into product design.
Reported by TechCrunch, by Ivan Mehta, on August 7, 2026.
