A New Mexico judge may have just established a new framework for more effective social media restrictions for teens, in addition to ruling that Meta will have to pay $567 million for facilitating harm to teens in its apps.
As reported by KOB News, New Mexico Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid said the state of New Mexico is in a youth mental health crisis and that Meta’s platforms are “a significant contributing cause to the crisis.”
The penalty was the second element of a two-phase litigation pursued by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. In the first phase, which was subject to a jury verdict back in March, Meta was found liable for failing to protect young users from child predators in its apps, with the jury approving $375 million in civil damages against the social media giant.
This second phase also relates to Meta’s failure to protect teens, with the ruling increasing the total financial impact to a combined $942 million for the business.
The funds will go towards support, awareness and prevention measures.
In addition, Judge Biedscheid also outlined a multi-step approach that Meta will be required to implement in order to limit the negative impacts of social media on teens moving forward.
Those include:
- Meta will be required to expand youth safety measures on Facebook and Instagram in New Mexico
- Meta will be required to make all profiles of users under 18 private by default, and also block adult users from connecting with teens by default also (Meta already does this)
- Meta will be required to eliminate push notifications for all users aged under 18 from 10pm to 7am every day, and from 8am to 3pm during the school year
- Meta will need to hide like counts by default for users under 18
- Meta will be required to put into effect a mandatory usage cap for users under 18 of no more than 90 hours per month across Facebook and Instagram
This framework could become the foundation for a broader regulatory approach to limit the harmful impacts of social media on teen users, with the restrictions on usage likely to be more effective than all-out teen social media bans, which initial research from Australia has shown are having little impact.
Though it all comes down to effective detection, and how good Meta’s systems are at determining each user’s age, in order to actually stop teens from evading these parameters.
On that front, the judge ruled that Meta must do more to seek proof of age for suspected underage users, and delete accounts for users under 13 who do not verify within 30 days.
That remains the key challenge. In Australia, initial reports on the effectiveness of its teen social media ban have indicated that most teens have been able to side-step age detection systems, or keep using social apps without an account, which still enables access to a lot of potentially harmful content.
Any effective approach would need to both restrict access to such material for non-logged-in users, while also implementing more stringent age checks, likely via a government-approved, universal system that would be applied to all social media platforms.
But if these systems can be enacted, then the guidelines proposed here could be helpful, and could limit harmful usage habits among teens.
In response, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said on X that the company will appeal the court’s ruling, and that the company remains confident in its record of protecting teens online.
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