Meta fined $567m over child safety

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has been ordered to pay a fine of $567 million by a U.S. judge over their failure to warn people about the dangers of the platform to children.

The fine, which is equivalent to £421 million is the largest against the company for child safety concerns. It is in addition to $375 million in fines that Meta, who also own WhatsApp and Threads, has been ordered to pay in the case in the U.S. state of New Mexico. While the fines are huge, Meta posted $61 billion in revenue in just a few months according to its latest financial results.

The judge said that Meta is a “public nuisance”, comparing it to a factory with “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children to be the pollution that must be abated”. The state attorneys bringing the case argued that Meta should be liable for the way their platforms exposed children to sexually explicit material and contact with sexual predators. In the first part of the trial, they were found to have repeatedly violated the state’s laws by steering users toward harmful content.

In his ruling, the judge compared the effects of Meta’s platforms on children to the way in which “noxious pollution produced by the factory can harm the common public right to reasonably clean air”. These effects do not stay on the platforms but “migrate to the internet as a whole and, perhaps most concerning, to the real world” creating “a common, societal burden on and harm to the affected children and their families”.

In addition to the fine, Meta was ordered to ban underage users from sending or receiving content containing nudity, eliminate ‘like’ counts for teens, and implement usage limits and notification curfews for those under 18. It was also order to enact a “1-strike policy for adult users who engage in child sexual exploitation”.

Meta is facing thousands of lawsuits in the United States over claims that it is endangering children and producing products that are deliberately addictive. Earlier this year it lost a landmark case where it was found to have intentionally built addictive social media platforms.

A spokesperson for Meta said: “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”. They said they would appeal the ruling and added: “We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online and will continue to defend ourselves against claims that misrepresent the facts.“