Meta’s public nuisance case New Mexico has billion-dollar consequences
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday, March 26, 2026 at RS.D. He was seen at the US Capitol following a meeting in Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s office.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Meta It returned to a New Mexico courthouse on Monday as part of an ongoing child safety case that could determine whether the company is considered a public nuisance and must spend potentially billions of dollars to repair its products.
The social media company lost the first round of the lawsuit, which centered on allegations that New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez failed to protect children from sexual predators on its apps and misled the public about the harms resulting from the use of apps like Instagram and Facebook.
A New Mexico jury in March ruled that Meta willfully violated the state’s unfair practices law and that the company must pay $375 million based on the count of crimes.
The second phase of the trial, known as a non-jury trial, will determine over a three-week period whether Meta’s actions caused a public nuisance, thereby ensuring possible product changes.
Meta said: quarterly filing Last week, the New Mexico AG’s office is seeking “approximately $3.7 billion in cost reductions as well as injunctive relief that includes requests for sweeping changes in the way we provide our services in New Mexico.”
For Meta and its peers, the case is one of several this year that experts are calling social media’s “Big Tobacco” moment. In the 1990s, tobacco companies were forced to pay billions of dollars for misleading the public about the safety and potential harms of their products, and subsequently saw their power and influence decline dramatically.
“It wasn’t an instant change, but the power that the big tobacco companies have today, and if we compare that to the 1980s and even the ’90s, I mean there’s no comparison,” said Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “They really don’t have that position anymore.”
The other major social media case settled this year took place in Los Angeles in March. commodity and Google’s The YouTube service lost a personal injury lawsuit involving a plaintiff who claimed he became addicted to apps like Instagram and YouTube as a child.
In New Mexico, Torrez said at a news conference last week that the AG wants Meta to overhaul its practices by implementing effective age verification technologies, changing recommendation algorithms that won’t endanger the welfare of children, and making other changes that result in “fundamentally restructuring how Meta is allowed to do business in the state.”
Torrez also said the state wants an “independent monitor” to ensure the company complies with the proposed changes because “we now know that Meta cannot be trusted to regulate itself, to comply independently and to correct its behavior.”
A Meta spokesman said in a statement that New Mexico’s demands were “technically impractical, impossible for any company to meet and ignore the realities of the internet.”
“While it is not in Meta’s interest to do so, if a workable resolution to Attorney General Torrez’s requests cannot be reached, we may have no choice but to completely remove access to our platforms for users in New Mexico,” the spokesperson said.
‘First test case’
Meta, YouTube, TikTok and explode They are also involved in a major federal lawsuit in the Northern District of California involving similar allegations that the companies misled consumers and developed flawed apps with features that encouraged unhealthy and addictive behaviors in teens and children.
That hearing, involving hundreds of school districts, is expected to begin June 15. Adam Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law, said plaintiffs’ lawyers will likely be eyeing the New Mexico case because both cases involve allegations that are a public nuisance to the state.
“This case will not only determine whether these kinds of grand solutions are available for the state of New Mexico, but it will be like the first test case filed nationwide for a theory that all of these school districts are relying on in federal court, all brought together under one roof,” Zimmerman said.
The most prominent example of public nuisance litigation in New Mexico involves a 2022 lawsuit against Walgreens in Santa Fe related to the opioid crisis, the state’s deputy AG, James Grayson, said at last week’s news conference. The state has finally reached a point $500 million settlement With Walgreens.
“This set the stage or set the stage for public nuisance in this type of area,” Grayson said. “What we’re really trying to do is show the harm statewide and the real impact on New Mexicans because of this action.”
Meta called New Mexico’s effort “a misguided strategy that ignores hundreds of other apps that young people use every day.”
“No matter what, we’re committed to providing safe, age-appropriate experiences, and we’ve already instituted many of the protections the state is seeking, including 13 security measures last year,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email. he said.
Guggenberger said the challenge for plaintiffs will be to “articulate harm to third parties” in the state due to public nuisance allegations. Although public nuisance cases traditionally originate in the physical world, lawyers are now testing this legal approach to the digital world for the first time, he said.
This is yet another attempt by plaintiff lawyers to implement new legal strategies against tech giants like Meta; Many critics say it avoids liability largely because of the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being sued for third-party content on their platforms.
Zimmerman said Meta and other social media companies may eventually appeal to the Supreme Court if they continue to lose cases.
Zimmerman said the plaintiffs are trying to say that “this is not a typical Section 230 case about content that should or should not be removed.” More precisely, they say, “It’s about the entire system, and the system is like a defective product.”
“As social media companies, we are a product that mediates content,” Zimmerman said.
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