by Dan Frieth, Reclaim The Net:
Chief District Court Judge Bryan Biedscheid has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a New Mexico abatement fund. He refused to overtly order age verification across Facebook and Instagram. But then he ordered a narrower version of it, aimed at the accounts Meta’s own systems predict belong to children under 13, which would ultimately lead to age verification anyway.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in 2023, alleging that the company failed to protect children from abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking. A Santa Fe jury in March found 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act and imposed $375 million in civil penalties, the maximum state law allows. The jury determined that the company knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms. A second, bench phase asked whether the platforms are a public nuisance, and Biedscheid concluded that they are a “significant contributing cause” of the teen mental health crisis in New Mexico.
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Torrez had asked the court to require Meta to apply “various age-verification tools” on its platforms, accurate – David Ackerman, an attorney for the state, told the court – to 99 percent, enough to keep under-13s off the apps entirely.
Here’s where it gets confusing. “Because of the COPPA Rule, it is the Court’s conclusion that it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age-verification purposes,” Biedscheid wrote. But how would Meta know that an account belongs to someone under 13 without at the very least passively tracking them, what they write, say, and do?
The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act dates from 1998. It bars operators from collecting personal information from anyone under 13 without a parent’s verified consent. The FTC’s rule defines collection broadly – requesting or prompting a child to hand over information counts, and so does passive tracking of a child online. Asking a 12-year-old to prove she is 12 means collecting from her the thing the statute was written to keep out of Meta’s hands. The FTC keeps promising a revamped version, and the judge dealt with that in one line. “The FTC policy from 2026 does not change the COPPA Rule.”
But the same rule limits the guessing. Meta’s work on age prediction is “hindered by COPPA and its prohibition on the use of data that is needed to train a classifier to be more accurate in its age predictions,” the judge wrote. He added that he was not criticizing the policies behind the law.
He was unimpressed by the alternatives. The state’s proposals included making the youngest users “acquire identification or appear before a judge to obtain a judicial determination of their age.” Those were “unreasonable and would result in an unworkable barrier to the use of Meta’s platforms by those who have a right to do so.” Barriers that high, he added, “would merely shift users to other, non-party platforms.” He also noted that ordering age checks on Meta and not on other social media companies would be “inequitable and unduly injurious” to the company.
“Other possible solutions, such as using cellphone company or app store data to verify age more accurately, are unavailable to this Court for a lack of jurisdiction over any such parties,” he wrote. He added that “the regulatory solutions to these problems lie in the executive and legislative branches and not with this Court.”
Was that a complaint or an instruction?
