Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, is seen at the US Capitol after a meeting at the office of Senate Majority Leader John Thune, RS.D., Thursday, March 26, 2026.
Tom Williams CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Meta returned to court in New Mexico on Monday as part of an ongoing child safety lawsuit that could determine whether the company is considered a public nuisance and must spend nearly billions of dollars to fix its products.
The social media company has lost the first round of a lawsuit centered on claims brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez that it failed to protect children on its apps from predators and misled the public about alleged harm from using apps like Instagram and Facebook.
A New Mexico judge ruled in March that Meta willfully violated the state’s wrongful-death act, and that the company must pay $375 million based on the number of lawsuits.
The second stage of the trial, known as the non-judicial jury, will establish in three weeks if Meta’s actions cause public nuisance, thereby authorizing possible product changes.
Meta said in a quarterly filing last week that the AG’s office in New Mexico is seeking “approximately $3.7 billion in abatement costs and unsanctioned exemptions, including requests for extensive changes to the way we provide our services in New Mexico.”
For Meta and its peers, the case is one of many this year that experts have described as a “Big Tobacco” social media moment. In the 1990s, tobacco companies were forced to pay tens of millions of dollars for misleading the public about the safety and potential harm of their products, and later saw their power and influence greatly diminished.
“That was not an immediate change, but if you compare the power that the big tobacco companies have today, and compare it to the 1980s or even the 90s, I mean there is no comparison,” said Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “Of course they no longer have that position.”
Another major social media trial completed this year took place in Los Angeles in March. Meta again For Google YouTube has lost a personal injury case involving a plaintiff who claimed to have become addicted to apps like Instagram and YouTube at a young age.
In New Mexico, the AG wants Meta to change its operating systems by using features such as effective age verification technology, changing recommendation algorithms that do not endanger the health of children and making other changes that result in “a fundamental reorganization that Meta is allowed to do business in the state,” Torrez said in a press conference last week.
Torrez also said that the state is asking for an “independent monitor” to ensure that the company complies with the proposed changes, because “we know now that Meta cannot be trusted to regulate itself, to comply independently and to correct its behavior.”
A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that New Mexico’s demands are “technically impossible, impossible for any company to meet and ignore the realities of the Internet.”
“While it is not Meta’s intention to do so, if a viable resolution to Attorney General Torrez’s demands is not reached, we may have no choice but to remove access to its platforms from users in New Mexico entirely,” the spokesperson said.
‘The first test case’
In the LA case, jury members found that Meta and YouTube’s negligence was a “significant factor” in the plaintiff’s severe mental health problems. The companies were ordered to pay a total of 6 million rands in compensation and penalties, with Meta responsible for 70% of the fines.
Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap they are also involved in a major federal investigation in the Northern State of California involving similar claims that the companies misled consumers and created flawed apps with features that encourage unhealthy and addictive behavior in youth and children.
That case, which involves hundreds of school districts, is expected to begin June 15. Attorneys for the plaintiffs will likely watch the New Mexico trial because both cases involve allegations of public nuisance, said Adam Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.
“This case will not only determine whether these grand remedies exist for the state of New Mexico, but it will be like the first case to test the theory that all of these school districts rely on in federal court filed across the country, and they’re all rolled into one,” Zimmerman said.
New Mexico’s most prominent example of a public abuse case involves a 2022 opioid-related lawsuit in Santa Fe against Walgreens, James Grayson, the state’s deputy AG, said during a press conference last week. The state eventually reached a $500 million settlement with Walgreens.
“That created or laid the foundation for using public concerns in this type of space,” Grayson said. “What we’re really trying to do is show the damage across the country and the real impact on young Mexicans from this act.”
Meta called the New Mexico effort “a misguided strategy that ignores hundreds of other apps that youth use every day.”
“However, we remain committed to providing a safe, age-appropriate experience and have already introduced many of the protections the state requires, including 13 security measures this past year,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email.
Guggenberger said the plaintiffs’ challenge will be to “talk about the damage that is happening to third parties” in the state, as a result of the claims of public harassment. While civil tort suits have traditionally taken off in the world, lawyers are now testing this legal approach for the first time in the digital environment, he said.
Another effort by plaintiffs’ lawyers is to use new legal tactics against tech giants like Meta, which many critics say have escaped accountability, largely because of the Section 230 shield of the Communications Decency Act that protects websites from lawsuits over third-party content on social media.
Meta and other social media companies could eventually turn to the Supreme Court if they continue to lose cases, Zimmerman said.
The plaintiffs are trying to argue that “this is not a typical Section 230 case involving content that should or should not have been taken down,” Zimmerman said. Instead, they say, “this is about the whole system, and the system is like a defective product,” he added.
“And for social media companies, they’re like, we’re a product that mediates content,” Zimmerman said.
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