A New Mexico judge ordered new child safeguards for Meta. Advocates hope other courts follow

In a landmark ruling against Meta, a New Mexico judge likened the company’s social media platforms to factories The psychological harm to children who use Facebook and Instagram, he said, can be seen as their pollution. He ordered new safety measures, including a time limit of 90 hours per month for users under 18, AI chatbot restrictions, and mandatory warnings on the platforms.How easily those features can be implemented, and how effective they could be at protecting young users from mental health harms, are unresolved questions.

They also would apply only to children in New Mexico, Meta has no deadline to introduce them, and the company has said it will appeal the ruling.But the judge’s order showed a possible path forward for other court fights around the country as Meta faces mounting legal, regulatory and public pressure to do more to protect young people.The ruling came in the second phase of a trial in a lawsuit the state of New Mexico filed against the social media giant. The new financial penalty is in addition to the $375 million in civil penalties that jurors ordered against Meta in March after determining the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.Meta said in a statement Thursday that it works to keep people safe on its platforms and has been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content.“We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts,” the company said.Implementation of court-ordered measures poses challengesMany of the changes ordered by Biedscheid hinge on strong age-verification measures. The ruling says Meta must improve its age assurance models and tools in New Mexico and proactively request proof of age for users they know or estimate to be under 13.What that proof of age could look like, however, is unclear.Age verification “can be done well in a privacy-protective way, but it is not easy,” said Peter Ormerod, an associate professor of law at Villanova University.Federal children’s privacy laws prevent Meta from applying age-verification tools to children und…