Meta Ordered to Pay $567M and Overhaul Teen Safety on Facebook, Instagram

Meta’s latest legal headache comes with a $567 million price tag and a five-year to-do list for Facebook and Instagram.

A New Mexico state court ordered Meta to pay $567 million and change how its platforms operate for young users, including limits on teen screen time, overnight notifications, adult contact with minors, and safeguards for AI chatbots. The ruling follows a separate $375 million penalty imposed in March, bringing Meta’s total liability in the case to $942 million.

For product, privacy, and trust-and-safety teams, the bigger story is the scope of the order. The court is not only demanding compensation. It is prescribing how Meta must redesign parts of Facebook and Instagram for minors.

Court order reaches into Facebook and Instagram design

Judge Bryan Biedscheid ruled that Meta had created a public nuisance in New Mexico, siding with state Attorney General Raúl Torrez in the second phase of the lawsuit.

The Business Times reported that the five-year decree requires Meta to block push notifications to underage users between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. and limit their use of Facebook and Instagram to no more than 90 hours per month.

Meta must also tighten restrictions on adult contact with minors, strengthen its handling of child sexual abuse reports, and add safeguards around AI chatbots.

Of the $567 million judgment, $420 million will fund treatment services for young people in New Mexico, according to The Associated Press. The remaining money will support awareness, prevention, screening, and related costs over five years.

Meta must also add recurring banners and informational screens explaining protection features, recommended practices, and tools for dealing with inappropriate comments. The Guardian said that those changes and an educational campaign will be subject to state review.

AI age checks become a compliance requirement

Age assurance is one of the more technically significant parts of the order.

The court stopped short of requiring broad age verification for every child. AP noted that federal protections under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act limit requirements that would involve collecting additional personal information from children under 13 simply to verify their age.

Instead, Meta must continue improving age-assurance systems that use signals such as a user’s friends and the content they post or consume. The company must also attempt to develop a dedicated model for predicting whether a user is under 13 within two years.

Users estimated to be under 13 must be treated as such until they verify their age. Meta must also delete personal information collected from under-13 users and work with schools or a child-safety organization on a portal where staff can flag accounts suspected of belonging to children under 13.

The company will have to report on its compliance progress twice a year.

For technology companies, those requirements illustrate how youth-safety enforcement can extend directly into AI models, data retention, user interfaces, notification systems, and compliance reporting rather than stopping at privacy policies or parental controls.

Meta said it will appeal the ruling and defended its existing safety work.

“We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” the company said in a statement, per The Guardian.

The New Mexico case is also unlikely to be the end of the dispute over social media product design. Meta faces thousands of lawsuits involving alleged harms to young people, while another federal case involving attorneys general from multiple states is scheduled to reach trial in California later in August.

AP said that Meta faces a federal multidistrict lawsuit involving 29 states, while separate state cases are also moving through the courts.

New Mexico’s ruling therefore matters beyond the $567 million judgment. If similar claims succeed elsewhere, social media companies could face growing pressure to treat youth protection as a product-engineering and compliance requirement, with courts scrutinizing everything from recommendation systems and notifications to age prediction and data deletion.

For Meta, the immediate question is whether its appeal changes the order. For the wider industry, the question is how many of New Mexico’s requirements could become a template for the next round of youth-safety cases.

Read next: Meta avoided a closely watched social media addiction trial after the plaintiff dropped the remaining claim, leaving broader questions over platform design unresolved.