A New Mexico Jury Just Found Meta Liable for Lying About Child Safety

For years, Meta's answer to every child safety concern has been a single well-rehearsed line about having 40,000 people working on this, investing heavily, and taking it seriously. It's a number designed to end conversations rather than start accountability, and for a long time, it worked.

However, on March 24, 2026, after a six-week trial in Santa Fe, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable on all counts for willfully engaging in unfair, deceptive, and unconscionable trade practices. The company has been ordered to pay $375 million in civil penalties. It's the first time a jury has ruled against Meta on child safety claims.

The Algorithms That Sent Kids to Predators

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez opened his 2023 case against Meta with a striking investigative method. His office sent undercover agents posing as children onto Facebook and Instagram to see what happened. And what happened was not subtle.

The fake child accounts were shown sexually explicit content they'd never asked for, and were contacted by adult men soliciting sex. Three of those men were later arrested, two of them at a motel where they believed they were meeting a 12-year-old girl. In one documented instance, a fictitious mother was permitted to offer her 13-year-old daughter to sex traffickers through the platform.

The jury identified approximately 75,000 violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act at the maximum $5,000 penalty per violation, arriving at $375 million. That figure is less than one-fifth of what the state had sought but represents the statutory ceiling per violation.

Zuckerberg Knew, and the Jury Agreed

The trial's most damaging testimony came not from state prosecutors but from inside Meta. Former engineering director Arturo Bejar testified after his own 14-year-old daughter received sexual solicitations on Instagram, saying that Meta's personalized recommendation algorithms are very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, they will be very good at connecting you with little girls.

Former Meta Vice President of Partnerships Brian Boland testified that he absolutely did not believe safety was a priority to CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he left the company in 2020. The AG's office also cited internal research and whistleblower accounts showing Meta employees had flagged child safety concerns long before any lawsuit arrived.

While Meta's appeal announcement isn’t surprising, I do find it revealing. The defense throughout this trial was that Meta invested heavily and was honest about the limits of its filters. The jury heard the same evidence and called it willful deception, and that gap between what Meta said publicly and what its own employees documented internally is exactly what the verdict reflects.

Midway through the trial, Meta also announced it would remove end-to-end encrypted DMs from Instagram later this year, citing low opt-in rates. The timing was notable, given the case had raised concerns that encrypted messaging could shield predators from law enforcement detection.

$375 Million and the Question of What Changes

Meta's stock rose 5% in after-hours trading after the verdict was delivered. Shareholders weren't alarmed, and they probably did the math correctly. $375 million is roughly two days of the company's revenue. The state had asked for more than $2 billion, and the judge can still impose non-monetary remedies, including platform design changes and independent audits, in a separate phase of the case.

This verdict is being watched nationally. Hundreds of similar lawsuits are working through US courts from individuals, school districts, and other state attorneys general, and a separate trial in Los Angeles is already running over social media addiction and mental health harm. New Mexico's AG called it "a watershed moment for every parent." Unlike blanket social media bans, which do more harm than good, this is actually a decent step toward protecting children online.

And yet, the fine alone will not change Meta's incentive structure on its own. What the company has been asked to do is pay a fraction of a percent of its market cap and promise it will do better, which is roughly the same arrangement it's had with regulators for the past decade. The only outcome that actually threatens the status quo is what comes next in that Santa Fe courtroom when the judge decides whether structural reforms get ordered or the story ends at a check nobody at Meta will lose sleep writing.