New Mexico's First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe ordered Meta on 6 August to fund a $567m abatement programme over five years — $420m for treatment services for young people and $147m for awareness, prevention and screening. Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid issued the remedies ruling following a jury verdict in March. Meta says it will appeal.
Not a fine
The abatement fund is separate from the $375m in civil penalties already assessed after the 24 March 2026 jury verdict in the state's public-nuisance and Unfair Practices Act case. Combined exposure is roughly $942m. Coverage describing "a $567m fine" collapses two distinct awards into one.
The AI mandate
The injunctive terms are the unusual part. Meta must keep improving AI-based age assurance in New Mexico using signals such as friend networks and content consumption, and must develop a dedicated under-13 age-prediction model within two years, then request verification for users it estimates are under 13. It must also build a reporting portal with schools or a child-safety organisation so administrators can flag suspected under-13 accounts across platforms.
What the judge would not do
He expressly declined to order changes to infinite scroll and autoplay, saying industry-wide feature regulation belongs to legislatures or the executive, and citing First Amendment and Section 230 concerns. He also declined to mandate universal age verification, citing COPPA limits on collecting under-13 data and the inequity of applying such a rule to Meta alone.
The precedent
A US court has now ordered a platform to ship a specific machine-learning classifier on a deadline, as a legal remedy. The design of the recommendation system it would feed remains beyond what the court was willing to reach.