New Mexico opened a bench trial today in Santa Fe, seeking additional damages from Meta on top of a $375 million jury verdict, demanding the company fundamentally redesign Facebook and Instagram for users under 18. Meta has warned it may quit the state entirely rather than comply.

What New Mexico is asking for: Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid will decide whether Meta’s platforms constitute a public nuisance under New Mexico law, a legal standard that allows a court to order a company to fix a harm it created, not just pay a fine. No court has ever applied this standard to a social media company.

The trial runs through May 22. New Mexico is also demanding Meta to fund a 15-year mental health plan for teens covering new healthcare facilities, staff, and provider hiring.

Platform changes New Mexico is demanding:

• Age verification: Block all children under 13, delete their existing accounts and data, and link every minor’s account to a parent or guardian account.
• Encryption: Roll back end-to-end encryption for all users under 18.
• Recommendations: Stop recommending minor accounts to adults and bar adults not directly connected to a minor from messaging them.
• Addictive design: Ban infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications during school and sleep hours; cap minor users at 90 hours per month; remove the default display of likes and share tallies
• Exploitation: Impose a permanent one-strike ban on any adult found to have engaged in child sexual exploitation, blocking them across the same device, IP address, or phone number
• Oversight: Appoint a Child Safety Monitor funded entirely by Meta for a minimum of five years, with authority to investigate internal systems and publish public reports; reinstate undercover accounts to monitor compliance

What they’re saying: “Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said. Torrez added the case aims “to change the paradigm of how this company does business, but also how Big Tech generally is expected to do business going forward.”

Meta said its demands are “technically impractical, impossible for any company to meet.” It warned: “If a workable solution is not reached, we may have no choice but to remove access to its platforms for users in New Mexico entirely.” Meta is invoking both First Amendment free speech protections and Section 230, the federal law that normally shields platforms from liability for content users post, arguing the mandates “infringe on parental rights and stifle free expression for all New Mexicans.”

Torrez dismissed the withdrawal threat as a “PR stunt”: “For years the company has rewritten its own rules and even bent to the demands of dictators to preserve market access. This is not about technological capability.”

Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University School of Law, flagged legal uncertainty: “That theory is not well accepted as applied to the internet.” On age verification: “In practice a court order saying that Facebook had to impose age authentication would have no Supreme Court textual support. The Supreme Court might bless it. We don’t know.”

How we got here: In 2023, New Mexico investigators created a fake profile posing as a 13-year-old girl on Facebook and Instagram. The account was immediately flooded with sexually explicit material and solicitations. No Meta algorithm flagged it.

The state sued Meta under the Unfair Practices Act, a New Mexico consumer protection law, arguing the company made false statements about platform safety and deliberately designed its apps to addict children.

The court rejected Meta’s Section 230 immunity claim in May 2024, denied Meta’s motion to dismiss in full, rejecting its attempt to get the case thrown out before trial, and most recently rejected Meta’s attempt to delay or stop the bench trial entirely.

A Santa Fe jury found Meta liable in March 2026 for 75,000 violations and ordered $375 million in civil penalties, the maximum under state law, making New Mexico the first state to win at trial against a major tech company for endangering children. The next day, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for addictive platform design, ordering $3 million in compensatory damages plus punitive damages.

Both cases are being compared to the Big Tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s, where US states successfully sued cigarette companies for knowingly selling a harmful product while hiding the evidence.

Internal documents from the trial showed Meta employees calculated that Mark Zuckerberg‘s 2019 decision to default end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger would affect detection of approximately 7.5 million child sexual abuse material cases. A separate Meta researcher flagged as many as 500,000 child exploitation cases daily across Facebook and Instagram.

Why this matters: More than 40 US state attorneys general have filed similar lawsuits against Meta. Federal legislation on platform liability, age verification, and addictive algorithms has repeatedly stalled in Congress, making state-level action the primary enforcement mechanism.

Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Goa have all announced plans to restrict children’s social media access. The central government is preparing a three-tiered law covering the age brackets 8-12, 12-16, and 16-18, likely introduced in the monsoon session of Parliament.

None of these proposals carry an enforcement architecture comparable to New Mexico’s, including a court-appointed monitor, mandatory encryption rollback, and algorithmic redesign under judicial oversight.

Andhra Pradesh is exploring DigiLocker-linked age tokens after meeting Meta, Google, X, Snap, ShareChat, and Josh in April. Meta told Indian states it will comply with Karnataka’s ban when enforced but warned against pushing teens toward less safe platforms, the same argument it is making in New Mexico.

India has no equivalent of the Unfair Practices Act to pursue a similar case. The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act requires parental consent for children’s data processing, and its rules were notified in November 2025, but core obligations including children’s data provisions only kick in 18 months after notification, around May 2027.

The Act carries no provision for injunctive relief, court orders that force a company to change its behaviour rather than just pay a fine, of the kind New Mexico is seeking.

Also read:

• Why banning children from social media avoids the real problem
• India considers 3-tier social media restrictions for kids
• Andhra Pradesh explores DigiLocker age tokens to regulate teen social media
• EU says Meta failed to stop under-13 users on platforms