Safety · Fortune Technology
Meta’s threat to quit New Mexico ‘is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,’ AG says
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New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed for injunctive relief against Meta today, seeking sweeping court-ordered changes to how the company operates its platforms for children.
Key facts
- In March 2026, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for 75,000 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act and ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties, the maximum allowed
- The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed in 1998 and has not been meaningfully updated—even as the FTC promises a newly revamped COPPA 2.0
- In 2023, investigators from the New Mexico Department of Justice created a social media profile posing as a 13-year-old, and found the account was almost immediately flooded with images, messages
- The six-week trial showed Meta’s own internal documents in which employees calculated that Zuckerberg’s 2019 decision to roll out end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger by default would affect
Summary
“Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” Torrez said Thursday. Ahead of the bench trial that begins May 4, Meta responded to Torrez’s statement on Thursday. “Despite Attorney General Torrez’s claims, the State’s demands are technically impractical, impossible for any company to meet and disregard the realities of the internet,” the company said . “While it is not in Meta’s interests to do so, if a workable solution to Attorney General Torrez’s demands is not reached, we may have no choice but to remove access to its platforms for users in New Mexico entirely.”