Meta fined $807m in massive social media child safety ruling

Social media giant Meta has been ordered to pay another $AUD807m for its lack of warnings for the public about the dangers its platforms posed to children. 

It's the biggest ruling against the company over child safety.

The BBC reports that Judge Bryan Biedscheid decided Meta is a "public nuisance" akin to air pollution, and directed it to put the money in a fund for reducing future harms.

Judge Biedscheid compared Meta to a factory, with advertising and content as its product, and said that "the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated".

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Meta responds to massive child safety fines

A spokesperson for Meta, which owns and operates Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads, said Thursday: "We disagree with the ruling and will appeal."

They added, “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 case stems from a 2023 lawsuit brought by attorneys for the State of New Mexico, arguing Meta should be responsible for the endangerment of children on its platforms, and their exposure to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators.

In the first phase of the trial, the BBC said that Meta was found to have "repeatedly violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act as its recommendation algorithms essentially "steered" young users toward harmful content and contacts."

In ruling on this second phase of the trial, Judge Biedscheid found that Meta's harms reached the level of "public nuisance", or an issue of health and safety that has become so widespread it is negatively impacting a general public.

"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 judge wrote.

The fund that Meta has been ordered to create will be used to pay for efforts to mitigate "the wide-ranging impacts of the harm", Judge Biedscheid said yesterday.

The judge also ordered Meta to ensure that no account of a user under age 18 is recommended to an adult and that no adult can message an underage user, ban the sending or receiving of nudity by underage users, and enact a "1-strike policy for adult users who engage in child sexual exploitation."

Meta was also ordered to:

• Eliminate "like" counts for users under 18
• Ban push notifications for such users every day between 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM and to ban such notifications during the typical school year between 8:00 AM to 3:00 PM, except on weekends
• Implement a mandatory usage limit for such users of 90 cumulative hours per month across Instagram and Facebook, or about three hours per day