State Court Rules that Meta Exposed Children to Sexual Exploitation
In August, 2026, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced that the state’s First Judicial District Court had ruled against Meta Platforms, Inc., ordering the corporation to pay over $940 million in civil penalties and to fund interventions addressing the youth mental health crisis. It also announced the imposition of court-supervised reforms to Facebook and Instagram that will remain in effect for five years.
The judgment followed a trial in which a jury found that Meta committed 75,000 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. After that initial ruling in March, the court further ruled that Meta’s platforms constitute a public nuisance in New Mexico, opening the door to injunctive relief and additional financial penalties. Injunctive relief means the court has ordered Meta to do more than just pay money. They also have to take steps to change how they behave. In this ruling, the court rejected the company’s claim that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 shielded it from liability for the products it designed. Section 230 states that online forums cannot be held liable for the content users post to their sites. Tech companies frequently use this law to avoid responsibility for illegal, abusive, or addictive content on their platforms. This has been a huge hurdle in previous attempts to hold big tech accountable.
The New Mexico judge did not accept this defense, ruling that Meta was not a public nuisance because of the content on its platforms, but because of the addictive and exploitative design of the platforms’ themselves. It is the first time a court has held that a social media company can be sued, tried, and held financially and structurally accountable for building products that endanger children.
In New Mexico v. Meta, which was filed in 2023, evidence was presented from an undercover operation in which law enforcement agents posed as children on Instagram and Facebook. The investigation found Meta’s platforms:
Showed underage users sexually explicit content without prompting.
Allowed adult predators to contact children and sexually exploit them.
Facilitated the spread and exchange of child sexual abuse material.
The Court’s injunctive relief targets the failures exposed at trial. In addition to the financial award, the Court ordered extensive reforms, including:
Implementing more rigorous age verification for New Mexico users, including additional measures to accurately identify the age of users within the limits of federal law;
Maintaining and strengthening protections for Teen Accounts in New Mexico;
Requiring enhanced protections against sextortion andchild sexual exploitation, including stronger safeguards for minors and tougher enforcement against offending adult accounts;
Preventing minors from sending or receiving nude images that violate Meta’s policies;
Preventing Meta chatbots from conducting sexual interactions with minors.
Providing specialized training and resources for New Mexico law enforcement investigating internet crimes against children.
The Court stopped short of mandating a hard age-verification requirement that the trial record showed was most needed. The Court exercised judicial restraint, making clear that sweeping policy choices of that kind belong to the legislative and executive branches, not the courts. Attorney General Torrez said closing that gap is now the job of the Legislature.
Street Grace applauds the New Mexico decision, and supports leveraging this important legal precedent to continue dismantling the arguments used by technology and social media platforms to continue profiting from facilitating the sexual exploitation of children and other sex trafficking victims.