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Following a $375 million settlement earlier this year, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is moving into the second phase of his legal battle against Meta. This stage targets not past conduct, but what Torrez describes as the core business model behind the profits generated by Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Beginning last Monday, Meta and the state’s lawyers returned to Santa Fe for a three-week trial. Torrez is framing the case as a dispute over the future of the platforms, seeking court-ordered changes to how they operate.
Torrez is asking the court to require Meta to implement several measures, including:
New Mexico is also pushing for Meta to achieve a 99% detection rate of content involving child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
In an interview with The Verge in Washington, D.C., Torrez said the objective from the outset has been to change how the company conducts business. He argued that even a $375 million penalty for a company with enormous profits is, for some executives, “a cost of doing business.” In his view, only direct product-level interventions that change user experience would matter.
While any court orders would apply only within New Mexico, analysts expect Meta could adopt similar changes nationwide to streamline governance. The company has also threatened to shut down services in the state if the demands are too burdensome, a tactic Torrez described as common among large technology firms facing local regulatory pressure.
A win for New Mexico could energize thousands of plaintiffs pursuing similar cases.
Peter Chapman, Deputy Director of the Knight-Georgetown Institute, said policy changes through litigation are not unusual in the United States, citing precedents such as tobacco, opioid painkillers, and electronic cigarettes. He characterized such actions as often setting the stage for broader nationwide policy discussions.
Not all of New Mexico’s demands have support among experts. Mandatory age verification would require Meta or a third party to collect more sensitive personal data, a concern privacy advocates say could backfire and make users less safe.
The proposed end-to-end encryption ban has also drawn opposition. Don McGowan, a former board member of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), argued that the change would be the fastest way for users to abandon Messenger and move to platforms outside the scope of the lawsuit. Meta has also said it recently removed encrypted messaging on Instagram due to very low usage.
Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said the state’s demands are misguided and infringe parental rights and free speech. Meta also said it has already deployed many safety measures, including 13 new safety tools in the past year.
On the CSAM detection target, Meta argued that achieving a 99% detection rate is mathematically impossible. The company said calculating such a rate would require knowing 100% of all content on the system to establish the denominator.
Torrez is also lobbying in Washington to amend Section 230, the law that shields tech platforms from liability for user-generated content. He argues that without this shield, tech companies would be forced to take real responsibility before juries for damages.
The outcome of the Santa Fe trial is expected to signal how young people in New Mexico use social networks and could reshape the engagement-driven profit model for major Silicon Valley platforms. The case is also framed as part of a broader pattern in which landmark rulings can become “new rules” when existing laws lag behind.
Source: The Verge, CNET
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