Meta fined $567M, deemed a ‘public nuisance’ over child safety | #childsafety | #kids | #chldern | #parents | #schoolsafey

Meta has been issued its largest fine yet by a court in New Mexico over failures to alert the public to the dangers its social media platforms pose to children.

The US judge has ordered the social media giant to pay a further $567 million (£421m) in addition to the $375m it was already ordered to pay in the New Mexico case, which found Meta liable for exposing children to inappropriate content.

The court found that Meta failed in protecting children and even endangered them, with their platforms exposing children to sexually explicit content and putting them in danger of groomers and sexual predators.

Meta said that it plans to appeal both fines and rulings.

The firm said: “We work hard to keep people safe on our platforms and have been transparent about the challenges of identifying and removing bad actors and harmful content. We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.”

The Facebook creator is facing numerous lawsuits across the US over social media addiction, harmful algorithms, and child safety failures as individuals and the state takes action against the impact of social media.

A previous lawsuit in the US found that Meta’s platforms, among others, were liable for addictive design that negatively impacted a young woman’s mental health, opening the door for other credible cases alleging the same.

The New Mexico ruling and fine gives credence to thousands of other lawsuits claiming that Meta’s platform design, specifically its recommendation algorithm, were harming children

The more recent fine and ruling found that this endangerment extended to a level of “public nuisance”, becoming an issue of safety for the general public.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid, who oversaw the case, likened the social media titan’s platforms to pollution: Just as noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air, the harmful effects of Meta’s platforms on children do not stay contained by its platforms and, instead, migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world and create a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families and schools, as well as hospitals and law enforcement.”

The ruling may mark the first time a social media platform  – or an online platform for that matter -has been deemed a public nuisance.

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The original trial lasted seven weeks and was settled by a jury, which found Meta was in violation of New Mexico’ Unfair Practices Act for misleading the public on its platform’s safety for children.

Jurors heard testimony that teens and children were being exposed to sexual content such as nudity, were approached by sexual predators on platforms like Instagram, and that 16% of all Instagram users reported that they were shown unwanted nudity or sexual activity in a week.

New Mexico brought the lawsuit up in 2023, where it claimed that Meta’s algorithm “steered” young users to sexually explicit content, in some cases child abuse as well as exposing them to sexual predators, traffickers, and groomers.

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