A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a youth-harm fund, bringing the two-phase case total to $942 million — about 1.6% of the company's 2025 profit. He ordered some child-safety measures but declined to force the age-verification and algorithm changes prosecutors sought.

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a five-year youth-harm fund on Thursday, closing the second phase of a child-safety case the state's attorney general has called a template for holding platforms accountable. Judge Bryan Biedscheid earmarked $420 million of the fund for mental-health treatment, with the rest going to prevention, screening, and awareness through 2031, according to rulings reported by CNBC, CNN, PBS NewsHour, and the Albuquerque Journal.

The abatement fund stacks on the $375 million civil penalty a jury imposed in March — the statutory maximum under New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, and far below the $2.1 billion the state had sought. Combined, Meta's exposure reaches $942 million. Set against the $60.46 billion in net income Meta booked in 2025, per its own fourth-quarter earnings release, the judgment runs to roughly 1.6% of a single year's profit — a sum the company clears in under six days.

The number isn't the story. The remedy is. The second phase was where prosecutors sought the orders that would actually reshape the product, and Biedscheid granted the modest ones and rejected the ones with teeth. He ordered Meta to build an under-13 detection model within two years, to treat suspected minors as underage until verified, to delete under-13 data, and to run a school-safety reporting portal. But he declined to mandate age-verification tooling — which he said would "exceed the authority of the court and may violate federal law" — and refused to force changes to the algorithm, including removing infinite scroll and autoplay, on the grounds it would "unreasonably interfere with Meta's business activities," per the Albuquerque Journal and Tech Policy Press.

That is the accountability gap in one sentence: a fund to treat the harm, and a judicial pass on the design plaintiffs argued causes it. Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the decision a victory for parents. Meta said it will appeal, echoing the posture it took in a separate Los Angeles case now before California's appeals court on Section 230 grounds. The full order — venue, docket number, and the complete remedy list — hasn't surfaced publicly. Whether the measures Biedscheid did order get enforced, and survive appeal, is what to watch.