A New Mexico jury on Tuesday ordered Meta to pay $375m in civil penalties after it found the company misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and enabled harm, including child sexual exploitation, against its users.
The lawsuit – the first jury trial to find Meta liable for acts committed on its platform – was brought by the state’s attorney general office in December 2023.
It followed a two-year Guardian investigation published in April of that year revealing how Facebook and Instagram had become marketplaces for child sex trafficking. That investigation was cited several times in the complaint.
“The jury’s verdict is a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” said New Mexico’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew. Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
The jury ordered Meta to pay the maximum penalty under the law of $5,000 per violation, totaling $375m in civil penalties for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. The jury found Meta liable for both claims brought by the state of New Mexico under the Unfair Practices Act.
Meta has said it will appeal the ruling, and accused Torrez of making “sensationalist, irrelevant arguments by cherrypicking select documents”.
“We respectfully disagree with the verdict and will appeal. We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and are clear about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors or harmful content,” said a Meta spokesperson. “We will continue to defend ourselves vigorously, and we remain confident in our record of protecting teens online.”
Internal Meta documents and testimony obtained by the New Mexico department of justice during the litigation revealed that both company employees and external child safety experts repeatedly warned about risks and harmful conditions on Meta’s platforms.
Evidence presented to the jury included details of the 2024 arrest of three men charged with sexually preying on children through Meta’s platforms, and attempting to meet up with them. This was part of a sting investigation operated by undercover agents and dubbed “Operation MetaPhile” by the attorney general’s office.
The New Mexico court heard how Meta’s 2023 decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger – its direct messaging platform, which predators have used as a tool to groom minors and exchange child abuse imagery – blocked access to crucial evidence of these crimes.
Witnesses from law enforcement and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) testified about deficiencies in Meta’s reporting of crimes taking place on its platforms, including the exchange of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Meta has generated high volumes of “junk” reports by overly relying on AI to moderate its platforms, investigators said. These reports were useless to law enforcement, and meant crimes could not be investigated, they said.
In the next phase of the legal proceedings, due to begin on 4 May, the attorney general’s office will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that “offer stronger protections for children”, said Torrez.
The design feature changes the state is seeking include “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.
In taped depositions played at the trial, the Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram leader Adam Mosseri said harms to children, such as sexual exploitation and detriments to mental health, were inevitable on the company’s platforms due to their vast user bases. Company executives also testified the company had invested billions in technology updates to keep children safe on their platforms. They include Instagram Teen Accounts, which debuted in 2024 and sets default protections for users aged between 13 and 17.
Social media companies have long maintained they are not responsible for crimes committed via their networks because of a US federal law that generally protects platforms from legal liability for content created by their users: section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Meta’s attempts to invoke section 230 and the first amendment to get the case dismissed were denied in a judge’s ruling in June 2024, due to the lawsuit’s focus on Meta’s platform product design and other non-speech issues, such as internal decisions about content and curation.
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Meta, YouTube found liable for woman’s debilitating social media addiction in $3M landmark trial
A Los Angeles jury found Wednesday that Meta’s Instagram and Google’s YouTube harmed a young user with features designed to hook kids — in a bombshell verdict that “shakes Big Tech’s predatory business model to its core.”
The high-profile case involved a 20-year-old woman, only known as K.G.M., who claimed she became dangerously obsessed with the apps at a young age because they were deliberately built to be addictive, using features like infinite scroll and autoplay.
The tech giants were found liable for $3 million in compensatory damages for the harm caused. The jury also awarded $3 million in punitive damages.
Meta was ultimately found liable for $4.2 million in damages and Google was found liable for $1.8 million.
The judgment might be a small amount for two of the world’s most valuable companies; however, the bellwether verdict could now influence thousands of similar cases against the powerful tech companies — and their peers — brought by parents, states, and school districts.
At least half of American teens use YouTube or Instagram daily, according to the Pew Research Center.
Snapchat and TikTok were also defendants in the first-of-its-kind trial, however, both settled with the plaintiff before it began.
The outcome is an “earthquake that shakes Big Tech’s predatory business model to its core,” according to Sacha Haworth, executive director of the online safety watchdog Tech Oversight Project.
“This trial was proof that if you put CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg on the stand before a judge and jury of their peers, the tech industry’s wanton disregard for people will be on full display,” Haworth said in a statement.
The case was so unprecedented because it bypassed longstanding legal protections, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, by targeting product design rather than content — making it a turning point for tech accountability.
The landmark judgment is now expected to open the floodgates to more litigation against Big Tech.
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Vince Vaughn Criticizes Late-Night TV for Having Political ‘Agenda’: ‘It Stopped Being Funny and Started Feeling Like I Was in Class’
Vince Vaughn has some thoughts about late-night television.
On a new episode of Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend,” the two got to talking about how comedy has become more political in recent years, with Vaughn saying it’s “part of the job because you’ve got to talk about current events, but you don’t want to become part of a group and feel like you’re a champion for one ideology. You want to make fun of everybody.”
Von said Hollywood is a “liberal place” and Vaughn added an addendum: “But not really. It’s more like, ‘We’re smart and got it figured out, and if you don’t agree then you’re an idiot.’” He continued, “There was definitely a culture that if you didn’t agree with these ideas, you were looked at as bad.”
This attitude, said Von and Vaughn, bled into the late-night TV landscape, plaguing the programs hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and more. (Vaughn and Von did not name names.)
“A lot of the late shows have struggled because … the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was white, redneck kind of people, and then everything tanked after that,” said Von.
“The podcasts have gotten so much more popular with less production, less writers, less staff. And the reason is … people want authenticity,” added Vaughn. “The talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to [evangelize] people to what they thought. And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic. It felt like they had an agenda. It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a fucking class I didn’t want to take. I’m getting scolded.”
While many believe the reason late-night shows are in decline is shifting viewing habits and the move away from linear television, Vaughn thinks the main problem is the shows themselves.
“The phenomenon isn’t what they say. They always blame technology, but the reality is it’s the approach,” he said.
“People are going to tune into a podcast more so because they want to feel like people are having a real conversation. It’s interesting to them,” Vaughn added. “But if you look at what happened to the talk shows and why their ratings are low, it’s got only to do with the fact of what you just said, which is they all became the same show. They all became so about their politics and who’s good and who’s bad.”
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