{"id":847221,"date":"2026-08-07T21:26:08","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T21:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/847221\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T21:26:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T21:26:08","slug":"meta-ruled-a-public-nuisance-ordered-to-pay-567-million","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/847221\/","title":{"rendered":"Meta ruled a “public nuisance,” ordered to pay $567 million"},"content":{"rendered":"

Months after being fined $375 million by a New Mexico judge<\/a> and being found liable for harm perpetrated on its platforms, the same judge has compared Meta to a factory and \u201cthe psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated.\u201d Judge Bryan Biedscheid labeled the factory a \u201cpublic nuisance\u201d and ordered it to pay an additional $567 million, bringing the total fines to $942 million. According to the BBC<\/a>, Meta plans to appeal the decision.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The $567 million is ordered to be placed into an abatement fund, the vast majority of which will go to treatment for the psychological harm the company, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been ruled to have caused to children and teens. $420 million is marked for treatment, with $33 million set for awareness and prevention, $90 million for screening and assessment, $15 million for referral, linkage and coordination, and $9 million for implementation, continuous quality improvement, and evaluation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The court also recognized the importance of figuring out who using the platforms were children and who were adults, though it recognized the practical limitations of this. The court rejected requests for age verification, writing in the decision<\/a> that the state \u201ccannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes.\u201d Subsequently, he ruled that the abatement fund, \u201cwhile far from ideal or sufficient, is most appropriate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Per the BBC, this is just one of thousands of cases that Meta is currently facing in the United States over similar issues. Though it received nearly $1 billion in fines in just one courtroom, the outlet reports that Meta posted $61 billion in revenue in the last quarter alone. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Months after being fined $375 million by a New Mexico judge and being found liable for harm perpetrated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847222,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-847221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847221\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}