A state judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay $942 million in penalties and abatement costs after a jury found the company violated consumer protection laws and misled parents about the safety of Facebook and Instagram for kids.

The decision marks one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on a major technology company for child safety violations, and it comes at a time when social media platforms are facing unprecedented scrutiny over their impact on young users. The case represents a significant shift in how courts are approaching corporate liability in the digital age, potentially setting a precedent that could reshape how tech companies operate when minors are involved.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid ruled Thursday that Meta must create a new $567 million abatement fund on top of the $375 million in civil penalties a jury had already imposed. The abatement fund — intended to address harms caused by Meta’s social-media apps — was “necessary, due to the wide-ranging impacts of the harm and the complex nature of the remedy,” Biedscheid wrote.

The concept of an abatement fund is typically used in environmental and public health cases to remediate ongoing harm to communities. By applying this legal mechanism to social media harm, the court is treating the digital safety crisis with the same gravity as physical contamination or public health emergencies. This approach suggests that courts are beginning to recognize the lasting psychological and social impacts of platform design on vulnerable populations.

The ruling also forces Meta to impose strict new safety features for underage users in New Mexico, including:

• Limits on how much time minors can spend on Facebook and Instagram
• Hiding the number of “likes” on photos by default for those users
• Disclosing to young users the risks associated with its platforms

These mandated features directly challenge Meta’s core business model, which relies on maximizing user engagement and time spent on platform. The requirements echo concerns raised by former Meta employees and child development experts who have long argued that features like visible like counts and infinite scroll are deliberately designed to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, particularly in adolescents whose brains are still developing impulse control and self-regulation.

The case was brought by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez after his office conducted an undercover investigation in 2023. Investigators created a fake social media profile of a 13-year-old girl — and it was immediately flooded with inappropriate images and targeted solicitations from child predators.

The undercover investigation methodology proved crucial to the state’s case, providing direct evidence that Meta’s safety systems were inadequate despite years of public assurances from company executives. The speed and volume of inappropriate content directed at the fake profile demonstrated systemic failures in Meta’s content moderation and user protection mechanisms.

“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.”

That’s Meta’s official statement to Breitbart News. The company says it will appeal and remains “confident in our record of protecting teens online.”

Meta’s confidence stands in stark contrast to the mountain of evidence presented during trial, which included internal company documents and testimony from whistleblowers. The company has consistently argued that it cannot be held responsible for all user-generated content on its platforms, citing both practical limitations and legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. However, this case focused on whether Meta misled consumers about safety features rather than on content liability alone.

But the jury didn’t buy it. During closing statements, Linda Singer, an attorney representing New Mexico, urged jurors to impose a civil penalty that could exceed $2 billion. The jury ultimately determined Meta should pay $375 million based on the number of violations found — and the judge just added another $567 million on top.

The jury’s verdict came after weeks of testimony examining Meta’s internal practices and decision-making processes regarding child safety features. The deliberations reflected growing public sentiment that technology companies must be held accountable when their products cause demonstrable harm, especially to children.

Meta now faces thousands of lawsuits from state attorneys general, school districts, and individual plaintiffs alleging the company prioritized growth over the safety of its underage users. The New Mexico case was the first to test whether social-media companies can be held legally responsible for content on their platforms.

The litigation wave represents a coordinated legal strategy by multiple states and jurisdictions, similar to the approach used in historic tobacco and opioid litigation. School districts, in particular, have argued that social media addiction has created measurable educational and behavioral problems that have strained their resources and required new interventions.

Another trial, brought by four state attorneys general, is set to begin jury selection in Oakland, California, next week. Meta has said in a court filing that the states in that case are seeking more than $1 trillion in damages.

The trillion-dollar figure underscores the potential existential threat these lawsuits pose to Meta’s business operations. Even for a company with Meta’s resources, sustained legal battles across multiple jurisdictions could force fundamental changes to how its platforms operate and generate revenue.

Zuckerberg built an empire on keeping users hooked — now he’s paying the price when those users are kids.

Donna Robinson was terminated following her public comments about the case, in which she stated Anthony would likely be “protected” in prison and added racial attacks on the victim’s family.

“I’m just glad we didn’t have to bury another Black child. Let them start burying some of theirs for a change. FK’em I said what I said.”

The TDCJ confirmed Robinson’s termination to The Dallas Morning News after Libs of TikTok exposed screenshots of her Facebook post Friday.

This woman claims to be on the Board of Pardons and Parole in Texas

She allegedly posted this after Karmelo Anthony was found guilty.

We reached out to @TDCJ but they declined to respond pic.twitter.com/OBxn2rRsdg

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 12, 2026

Robinson had written she was a “parole supervisor at TX DCJ” and assured readers Anthony “will be protected on the inside.” She went further, stating she didn’t “give fk about the family’s loss” and calling them “fking bigots.”

The TDCJ issued a statement saying Robinson’s comments were “incompatible with TDCJ policy and values.”

“These statements… demonstrate bias and a lack of the impartiality essential to the fair administration of justice in Texas,” the agency said. “Discriminatory or inflammatory conduct that erodes public confidence in the criminal justice system will not be tolerated.”

The statement noted employees are regularly expected to make workplace decisions free from bias.

Anthony, 19, was convicted of murdering Austin Metcalf, 17, whom he fatally stabbed at a high school track meet. He received a 35-year prison sentence.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once again admitted that the company was “pressured” to censor the New York Post’s bombshell story on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which detailed several emails concerning influence peddling operations centered on his father, then-candidate Joe Biden. The story was censored on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter and other outlets. He further admitted that the company censored Americans at the behest of the Biden-Harris Administration.

“In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured out teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree,” Zuckerberg wrote in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Zuckerberg went on to state that he believes “the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.”

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The Meta CEO then claimed that the company would not make the same decisions in the present day if again pressured by government officials. “Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Zuckerberg then, for the second time, confirmed that the company was pressured to censor the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story. Zuckerberg previously told podcast host Joe Rogan that intelligence officials told Meta that the story contained “hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign,” a thoroughly debunked lie that was advanced by current Biden Administration officials.

“In a separate situation, the FBI warned us about a potential Russian disinformation operation about the Biden family and Burisma in the lead up to the 2020 election,” Zuckerberg wrote. Hunter Biden served on the board of Ukrainian gas giant Burisma despite lacking qualifications. His former business partner, Devon Archer, has testified that Hunter’s inclusion on the board was aimed at selling the “Biden Family brand.”

According to Zuckerberg, Meta made the decision to censor the story based on the “warning” they had received from the FBI. “It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote, adding that the company has since changed its policies to prevent a repeat of the incident.

The “Russian disinformation” narrative, which has been thoroughly debunked, potentially played a massive role in swaying the election for President Biden, polling has consistently found. One poll found that 71 percent of respondents might have changed their views on President Biden if the story was reported accurately.

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Former President Donald Trump offered insight into a recent phone call he received from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg following the July 13th assassination attempt against him, telling Fox News he believes the onetime critic is now firmly in his corner.

During a Thursday interview with Maria Bartiromo, the 45th president spoke warmly about his call with the Facebook founder who praised him as a “badass” for standing up after being struck by a rifle round and pumping his fist in the air. A historic photo of Trump’s blood-smeared face in front of an American flag backdrop captured the moment and was even set to grace the August cover of Time Magazine, but still, the social media giant accidentally censored it. Zuckerberg called to apologize and much more, according to President Trump.

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“So Mark Zuckerberg called me – first of all he called me a few times. He called me after the event and said ‘that was really amazing, that was very brave,’ and he actually announced he was not going to support a Democrat because he can’t, because he respected me for what I did that day,” he told host Maria Baritomo. “I think what I did, to me it was a normal response. But I was called by Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, the day before on this same subject. And he actually apologized. He said they made a mistake, et cetera et cetera, and they corrected the mistake.” He noted “nobody called from Google” about a similar censoring of the image.

Unlike Facebook, “Google has been very bad, very irresponsible,” he continued, “and I have a feeling that Google’s going to be close to shut down, because I don’t think Congress is gonna take it. I really don’t think so.”

WATCH:

BREAKING: Trump says Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called him after the assassination attempt, said he isn’t going to support a Democrat and apologized for Facebook and Instagram censoring the iconic photos of him with his fist raised.

pic.twitter.com/0beGhyw6Ag

— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 2, 2024

Washington has put Facebook in its crosshairs going back to the 2016 elections when reports emerged that Russian intelligence officials were using the platform to spread disinformation about the Trump and Hillary Clinton campaigns. As a result, Zuckerberg promised in congressional hearings to tamp down on false political rhetoric and in recent years has ordered his company to restrict political advertising in a bid to lower the temperature of a virtual town square that awards anger and engagement. The Facebook founder has also refashioned his own image, taking up kickboxing and posting annual 4th of July videos of him wakeboarding while drinking a beer and holding an American flag.

He joins rival X owner Elon Musk in supporting – at least tacitly – President Trump, another indication that Silicon Valley is torn between supporting a Republican many privately despise but feel will be good for business versus a liberal Kamala Harris more in line with their “values.” On Wednesday more than 100 tech investors like Reid Hoffman and Vinod Khosla pledged to fundraise and campaign for Harris, the New York Times reported. That puts Zuckerberg and Musk at odds with the industry’s money crowd, though both have well-established platforms that answer to shareholders instead of private financiers.

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Facebook on Monday admitted to investigators that it temporarily shadow-banned the historic photo of former President Donald Trump proudly pumping a bloody fist in the air following the July 13th attempted assassination on his life.

The decision to censor the iconic image, which was originally set to grace the front of Time Magazine’s August edition, was an “error,” according to a company spokesman asked by the New York Post. According to the conservative social media account End Wokeness, a message from the company threatened to suspend another user after sharing the image which was purported to be “misinformation.” Dani Lever, a spokesman for Facebook’s parent company Meta, called that decision a “mistake.”

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“Yes, this was an error,” Lever wrote in response to a message from Charlie Kirk who had also blasted the social media network for disallowing sharing of the photo. “This fact check was initially applied to a doctored photo showing the secret service agents smiling, and in some cases our systems incorrectly applied that fact check to the real photo.” Lever added that “this has been fixed and we apologize for the mistake.”

UPDATE: This has been resolved. A “false positive.” https://t.co/JRfmJiiqWx

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) July 29, 2024

Users were up in arms over the apology, responding sarcastically that it must have been a “coincidence” that Facebook was once again censoring conservatives and MAGA faithful. “Nope, not buying it anymore,” one user on X said. “Funny that the ‘errors’ only ever go in one direction. Just coincidence, I guess,” wrote another. The Post also noted that Meta was just coming out of yet another anti-conservative controversy after its new AI chatbot referred to the Trump shooting as “fictional” when being asked to describe the incident.

Ironically, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg previously said in an interview that watching Trump pump his fist in that photo was one of the most “badass” moves he’s ever seen by a politician. Still, the world’s largest social media company is working to aggressively extricate itself from the political scene, prompting users on Instagram to “opt-in” if they would like to receive political content while making it increasingly difficult for political campaigns to run effective advertisements. A series of Wall Street Journal investigations in 2021 found that the company’s algorithms have for years promoted content that generated angry comments and other forms of engagement, generating activity but worsening the overall experience for users.

Earlier this year a federal judge ruled that the Biden administration unlawfully pressured Facebook and other social media companies to censor alternative points of view about the pandemic, suppressing information on alternative therapies to vaccines or questioning the effectiveness of masks in public. In a scathing rebuke, the judge ruled that the White House had overstepped its boundaries and limited the First Amendment freedoms of conservatives. The decision came in response to lawsuits filed by Republican attorneys general who claimed federal officials overstepped their authority by contacting companies like Twitter and Facebook to shut down accounts and chat rooms dedicated to questioning the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines during the height of the pandemic.

However, in June the U.S. Supreme Court reversed that order, siding with the Biden administration that it followed proper procedures in ordering Facebook to limit the spread of posts it deemed harmful to public safety.

“The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past Government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion, the Daily Caller reported. “But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms. Thus, the events of the past do little to help any of the plaintiffs establish standing to seek an injunction to prevent future harms.”

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Mark Zuckerberg felt a surge of patriotism on Saturday after watching former President Donald Trump narrowly escape the crosshairs of a deranged gunman, he admitted in a recent interview.

Sitting with a reporter for Bloomberg, the Facebook founder opened up about how he felt after watching the Republican leader get to his feet and pump his fist in the air, calling it “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

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He prefaced his answer by noting he would not be endorsing Trump or President Joe Biden this year but said it’s undeniable how “crazy” things have gotten around the world this election year. “The historic events over the last, like over the weekend. I mean on a personal note, you know, it’s seeing Donald Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life. At some level as an American, it’s hard to not get kind of emotional about that spirit and that fight and I think that’s why a lot of people like the guy.”

WATCH:

NEW – Zuckerberg: “Trump get up after getting shot in the face and pump his fist in the air with the American flag is one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life.”pic.twitter.com/XBKel7jscu

— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) July 19, 2024

Since bringing Facebook online from his college dorm room at Harvard, the millennial billionaire has remained consistently coy about his political leanings. However, his team at the quintessential social network provided the 2016 Trump campaign and digital director Brad Parscale with an exceptional level of support after they chose to heavily target voters using the platform’s algorithm.

Zuckerberg’s reticence on endorsing candidates doesn’t mean he hides his patriotism. He has made a semi-annual tradition out of surfing with an American flag and releasing videos of his escapades online around the Fourth of July each year. However, more recent changes to newsfeed preferences on Facebook and Instagram mean most users will have to begin opting in if they would like to see political content, a change that’s come after years of pressure to reform both platforms’ influence on American elections.

His counterpart and sometimes rival Elon Musk, who owns X, has taken the opposite approach, fully endorsing President Trump after the shooting and regularly espousing his opinions on news of the day. A recent report by the Wall Street Journal indicated that Musk was prepared to contribute upwards of $45 million per month to a super PAC supporting Trump, though Musk denied that claim in a post while insisting he is working behind the scenes to elect the Republican.

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The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday sided with the Biden administration in a censorship case brought by conservatives who argued the president overstepped his authority by ordering social media companies to ban users and remove posts during the pandemic.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court reversed a lower court’s opinion finding that the administration erred in pressuring companies like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to remove messages about the pandemic, masks, or vaccines it deemed harmful to public health. The case was brought by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Lousiana and five plaintiffs who claimed they were affected.

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“The plaintiffs rely on allegations of past Government censorship as evidence that future censorship is likely,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion, the Daily Caller reported. “But they fail, by and large, to link their past social-media restrictions to the defendants’ communications with the platforms. Thus, the events of the past do little to help any of the plaintiffs establish standing to seek an injunction to prevent future harms.”

Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented, with the latter writing that the majority “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”

“It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so,” he wrote, the outlet added.

In July 2023, Louisiana U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty found that the federal government egregiously overstepped its authority by “coercing or significantly encouraging” social media companies to comply with their demands or face repercussions. The “Orwellian” claims could be “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” he wrote at the time. A Fifth Circuit court later narrowed Doughty’s ruling but still reasoned that the White House, Surgeon General, CDC, FBI, and CISA violated the First Amendment.

The latest case saw the federal government criticize the previous injunction, saying the lower court’s move puts “unprecedented limits on the ability of the President’s closest aides to use the bully pulpit to address matters of public concern.” Conservatives online ripped the Supreme Court for its decision.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch,” Glenn Beck wrote on X. “SCOTUS finding a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri effectively means that the government is free to violate your rights so long as they do so through a third party,” added Spectator editor Amber Duke.

The Supreme Court has ruled that, practically, the government can continue pressuring social media companies to censor Americans. This is an absolute gut punch.

— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) June 26, 2024

SCOTUS finding a lack of standing for the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri effectively means that the government is free to violate your rights so long as they do so through a third party

— Amber Duke (@ambermarieduke) June 26, 2024

Investigative reporter Julie Kelly posted additional writings by Justice Barrett, with the majority concluding that plaintiffs failed to produce evidence that the government was behind instances of suppression at Twitter and LinkedIn. In another, Barrett writes it couldn’t be ruled out that Twitter censored a user according to its own terms, not pressure from a federal agency.

ACB joins Roberts and 3 liberals to write opinion overturning Missouri lawsuit against Big Tech and Biden White House for violating 1A rights by banning criticism of COVID policies and 2020 election. pic.twitter.com/OdKoZnYzvd

— Julie Kelly (@julie_kelly2) June 26, 2024

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