US Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a New Mexico abatement fund. He refused to overtly order age verification across Facebook and Instagram. But then he ordered a narrower version of it, aimed at the
accounts Meta's own systems predict belong to children under 13, which would ultimately lead to age verification anyway. New Mexico Attorney General Raoul Torrez sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in 2023, alleging that the company failed to protect
children from abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking. This legal action was addressed in two trials: A Santa Fe jury in March found 75,000 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act and imposed $375 million in civil penalties , the
maximum state law allows. The jury determined that the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. Now a second, bench asked whether the platforms are a public
nuisance, and Biedscheid concluded that they are a significant contributing cause of the teen mental health crisis in New Mexico. Torrez had asked the court to require Meta to apply various age-verification tools on its platforms , accurate to 99%,
enough to keep under-13s off the apps entirely. Because of the COPPA Rule, it is the Court's conclusion that it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes,
Biedscheid wrote. But how would Meta know that an account belongs to someone under 13 without at the very least passively tracking them, what they write, say, and do? What Biedscheid did order on age came from Meta. He adopted the company's own
proposed relief, calling it far from ideal or sufficient and, all the same, most appropriate. Meta must keep improving its age assurance models in New Mexico using AI tools, and must attempt within two years to build a dedicated under-13-years-of-age
prediction model. Where it cannot estimate a precise age, it must treat the user as under 13 or under 18 until they verify. And verify here likely means adults have to show ID to speak online, even though Judge Biedscheid said he wasn't mandating that.
Meta must also delete the personal information it has already collected on under-13s, and build a portal with schools or a child safety organization for flagging suspected underage accounts. The money will be paid over five years, with $420
million of it going to treatment and the rest to awareness, prevention, screening, referral and evaluation. It comes on top of the March penalties.
Comment: The Meta Settlement: What It Means for Your Speech and Privacy Under the teen safety provisions is a court-supervised identity system for every Facebook and Instagram user. See
article from reclaimthenet.org
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