A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million in the second phase of the state's child safety lawsuit against the company, pushing the total penalty to roughly $942 million, according to TechCrunch. The Verge, which reported the figure as bringing total charges to nearly $1 billion, said the ruling was published on Thursday by the Santa Fe district court.
The legal theory at the center of the case is unusual for a tech dispute: public nuisance. That's a claim more often associated with pollution or opioids than with social apps, and it asks whether a company's conduct created a widespread harm to the public rather than whether it broke a specific statute. According to The Verge, the court found that Meta's platforms are a significant contributor to the harm at issue.
The rest of the coverage points the same direction. Reuters, The Guardian, the BBC, KOB and The Wall Street Journal all reported the order, with several framing it around harms to children's mental health. The Wall Street Journal reported the total as $942 million, matching TechCrunch's figure.
The details available so far are thin — the sources here do not spell out the court's full reasoning, what remedies beyond money were imposed, or whether Meta plans to appeal.
What's notable is the shape of the ruling more than the size of the check, which Meta can absorb. If public nuisance law can be applied to social media products, other states have a ready-made template, and that possibility matters far more to the industry than one state's judgment.