Meta Jurors Weigh $2 Billion Fine in New Mexico Kid Safety Trial

Meta Platforms Inc. could face over $2 billion in civil penalties if a New Mexico jury sides with the state’s attorney general in a lawsuit accusing the social media giant of failing to disclose the dangers of child sexual exploitation on its platforms.

The jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico began deliberations Monday afternoon, capping off a six-week trial that saw testimony from top Meta executives and evidence from internal company documents.

State Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D) is arguing the company, which owns Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, has violated a pair of state consumer protections laws involving deceptive and unconscionable trade practices. Meta has countered at trial that it has never guaranteed absolute safety for teen users, and that it has invested heavily in safety tools.

The trial is one of the first among a wave of litigation targeting Meta and other top social media companies for harm to children. Torrez’s lawsuit, filed in 2023 accus Meta of ignoring internal data indicating that its platforms were used to connect children with sexual predators and became a digital marketplace for trading child sexual abuse material.

New Mexico’s case stems from an undercover investigation by the attorney general’s office that created fake accounts of purported children who received sexually explicit images even when they didn’t express interest in that content. In one case, Meta failed to disable a decoy Facebook account of a fictional mother who offered her 13-year-old daughter for trafficking.

The New Mexico case ran concurrently with a landmark social media trial in a Los Angeles state court, where jurors are set to decide whether Meta and YouTube are liable for addicting a teenage girl and causing her mental health harms. Thousands of similar addiction cases are awaiting trial in state and federal courts.

During closing arguments Monday, Linda Singer, an lawyer for Attorney General Raúl Torrez, told the jury the state estimated 208,700 teenage users Instagram and Facebook platforms. She said the state is seeking the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation for each user under the two separate consumer protection laws, amounting to $2 billion.

Singer offered an alternative calculation to the jury based on its estimate that 21% of teenage users experienced harm on Meta’s social networks. That award would total $1.3 billion.

“Believe it or not, and it’s hard to stand up and say with numbers like that, that they’re conservative numbers,” Singer said. “But they are.”

In its closing arguments, Meta’s attorney Kevin Huff of Kellogg Hansen Todd Figel & Frederick PLLC said Meta’s legal team only learned that the state was going to ask the jury for damages over the weekend. He said Singer’s closing arguments were the first time he’d seen the state’s damages calculation.

“That is a shocking number,” Huff said in closing arguments, which were broadcast on Courtroom View Network. “It would be multiple times the biggest judgment in the history of the state of New Mexico.”

He argued that the state failed to bring in a damages-specific expert to go over the number, instead dumping a bunch of numbers in the jury’s lap.

The case is State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc., N.M. Dist. Ct., No. D-101-CV-2023-02838, 3/23/26.