A New Mexico state court has fined Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, a total of $942 million. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Kursiv Media.
Judge Brian Bidshead called Meta a "public threat." The company was found guilty of having addictive algorithms in its social networks. It was ordered to fix this and improve age verification to prevent child sexual exploitation.
On August 7, the court ordered the tech giant to pay $567 million. Earlier, in March, the same court fined the company $375 million. At that time, a jury found that the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed information about their sexual exploitation on its platforms. As The Guardian explains, these are two stages of the same case. The total fines amount to $942 million.
According to the judge, most of the funds will go toward treating young people in New Mexico for internet addiction. The rest will be used for prevention.
The company plans to appeal both fines. Meta also denies that it is not doing enough to protect teenagers from dangerous content and will contest the court's claim to the contrary.
The New Mexico Attorney General's lawsuit was the first successful case in which a court proved that social media harms children's health. The court also required Meta to impose a limit for them: no more than 90 hours of social media use per month.
Earlier, Kursiv LifeStyle reported that WhatsApp users worldwide complained about account blocks. The outage was related to problems in automating protection against unwanted content.