Judge Orders Meta to Create $567M Abatement Fund for Child Harms in New Mexico ⇥ santafenewmexican.com

Phaedra Haywood, the Santa Fe New Mexican:

A state district judge in Santa Fe on Thursday ordered social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public harm to New Mexico children and teens.

Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s ruling resolves the second of a two-part civil proceeding in a landmark case filed in 2023 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who argued Meta’s social media platforms have led to a youth mental health crisis in the state and have exposed kids to exploitation by sexual predators.

This is in addition to a $375 million penalty issued by a jury in March.

The judge’s orders are worth reading, I think, because they show the careful reasoning that guided the state’s new requirements of Meta. People like Eric Goldman and Techdirt’s Mike Masnick who worried that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would be fundamentally undermined by the verdict of this case might be pleased. For example, the judge declined to mandate changes to “features designed to maximize screen time, such as autoplay videos [and] infinite scroll” because it would risk “running afoul of the First Amendment and Section 230 because of the direct effect those features have on content presentation”. If features like those — or algorithmic recommendations, about which the state’s proposed changes “are vague and aspirational” — are to be altered, it is something this judge punted to the two other branches of U.S. government.

Similarly, the judge declined the state’s proposal to restrict or eliminate end-to-end encryption in Instagram messages. In part, that is because Meta already removed the feature in March. But it is also because the evidence did not point to end-to-end encryption being of particular concern (paragraph 149):

Fundamentally, regarding sextortion, grooming and other exploitative activities, it is the algorithmically recommended connections of adults and adolescents that creates the most significant harm.

To that end, the judge says children’s accounts must not be recommended to adult users (paragraph 143), something Meta apparently does not already do.

Meta must make many other changes to the way it handles accounts belonging to children, including this curious restriction (paragraph 170):

Meta shall implement a mandatory usage time limit for accounts belonging to users under 18 years of age. Meta shall restrict the usage of all such users to not more than 90 hours of use per month cumulatively across Facebook and Instagram.

However, because of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, the judge cannot order that Meta “request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes”. Therefore, all of these age-based limitations will be based on estimations or information derived from other interactions.

Many of the most damning statements in this decision are quotes from internal Meta research, and the company could have made lots of positive changes itself. Instead, it exploited its own findings. A May 2020 presentation, for example, “explicitly connected notifications to time spent: a graphic included in the presentation shows the phrase ‘Fewer Notifications,’ which is then followed by an arrow pointing to ‘Fewer Sessions,’ which is followed by an arrow pointing to ‘Less Time Spent.'” while a presentation from June 2023 found “[p]erceived life interference from app use is highest for younger users”. Now that it has been forced to react by this court, it suggested a bunch of stuff it could do, which often agreed with its recommendations: limiting push notifications during school hours and at night, removing like counts, comparing itself to a polluting factory, and so on. Meta and its peers cannot and will not self-govern, even when they have the research. I have low expectations these changes will be rolled out to child users worldwide.