Meta Is Looking at Billions in Fines as the Company’s Home Becomes the Courtroom
Here's a breakdown of the truly overwhelming number of court cases against Meta.
Photo via Unsplash, Brett Jordan Splinter Meta
Edit: Mere minutes after this piece was published, it was announced that a California jury had found both Meta and YouTube liable in one of the cases discussed below, a landmark finding that asserts a young woman was harmed by design features that were both addictive and contributed to her mental health problems. Meta and YouTube must pay $3 million in compensatory damages, with most of the damages being paid by Meta. The jury will continue to deliberate on the question of further punitive damages the companies could potentially pay for malice or fraud, but regardless, this jury decision makes a massive precedent for thousands of other, similar cases where users are suing Meta claiming mental health damages. Who knows how many millions or billions Meta is ultimately looking at in damages?
When it comes to summing up the legal liabilities and vulnerabilities of Meta, the sprawling Mark Zuckerberg-founded tech giant that owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and more, it’s hard to even know where to start. The company is more embroiled in watershed legal fights in this moment than at any point in its history, simultaneously arguing cases in numerous U.S. states–against users, against the federal government, against international nations, against its own shareholders–that may all establish important precedent for the future of social media and digital communications. And those cases may also (hopefully) leave Meta on the hook for billions and billions of fines and penalties, as some small token of the psychic damage that the social media era has wrought on the American psyche.
This week, the first of the major dominoes fell: A New Mexico jury ruled that Meta had violated state law by failing to warn users about the dangers of its social media platforms, and failing to protect children from the advances of sexual predators. Said jury found Meta liable on all counts in the trial, saying that it had engaged in trade practices that are not only “unfair and deceptive” but also “unconscionable,” to the tune of $375 million in damages. That’s less than the billion-plus that the state’s prosecution under New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez had sought, but there’s still time for the actual amount to increase–a second phase of the lawsuit will be presented directly to the judge, who will rule whether Meta is on the hook to make other reparations in the state such as funding programs to ameliorate the harm it caused to children, and make changes to its platforms. Meta is already gearing up to appeal the decision. It’s probably just a coincidence that the company is also beginning massive layoffs this week as well.
The six-week trial in New Mexico truly put Meta through the wringer, featuring a parade of former employees and whistleblowers testifying that the platform had created an unsafe place for children and teens, and affirming what Torrez had called a “breeding ground” for child predators, something Meta naturally denies. An ex-Meta engineering director named Arturo Bejar testified about his attempts to warn Meta executives about the problem after his own 14-year-old daughter was sexually solicited by adult accounts on Instagram, saying that Meta’s algorithms would feed the user’s interest–even prurient interests. As Bejar put it: “The product is very good at connecting people with interests, and if your interest is little girls, it will be really good at connecting you with little girls.” Even Meta’s former Vice President of Partnerships, Brian Boland, testified in the trial that he “absolutely did not believe that safety was a priority” to Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg at the time Boland left the company in 2020. Talk about some damning insider perspective.
“New Mexico got a historic $375 million jury verdict in the first of several cases nationwide against Meta.”
Yesterday I heard a “did Instagram make your teen depressed? Join our class action lawsuit” ad on the radio. Knives are out. I hope every state and every parent sues Meta into oblivion.
— Rob Sheridan (@rob-sheridan.com) Mar 24, 2026 at 6:11 PM
Simultaneously, Torrez also presented findings from the state’s own undercover investigation into child sexual exploitation on Facebook and Instagram, wherein the attorney general’s office engaged in a To Catch a Predator-style series of sting operations, creating fake child profiles and documenting how they were sexually solicited by adult profiles on Meta’s social media sites. That investigation ultimately resulted in the arrest of three adult New Mexico men in May of 2024, all of whom were attempting to meet up with what they thought were 12-year-old girls they had met on Facebook or Instagram. On Tuesday, Torrez trumpeted the jury decision as “a historic victory for every child and family who has paid the price for Meta’s choice to put profits over kids’ safety,” saying that “Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew.”
Meta, meanwhile, effectively tried to argue that case in the court of public opinion, with a spokesperson on Monday before the jury’s verdict claiming that the lawsuit “makes sensationalist, irrelevant and distracting arguments by cherry picking select documents,” while simultaneously trying to affirm the reality of the problem and the company’s “longstanding commitment to supporting young people.” This is the very awkward line that the company often finds itself walking in these cases, wherein it needs to simultaneously tout its efforts to combat predators or support mental health, but also claim that either claims of the problems are overblown, or that those seeking justice for the problems are acting in bad faith. In the New Mexico case, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone took to Twitter at one point to claim that it was in fact Meta that cared about the kids and Attorney General Raúl Torrez who didn’t, saying that Torrez had “led an ethically compromised investigation into Meta that knowingly put real children at risk.” Sure, sure.
The New Mexico case, however, is just a single wave on a roiling sea of litigation that Meta finds itself paddling in.
Meta’s Wide World of Lawsuits
Meta is tied up in a dizzying array of other lawsuits and pieces of legal action brought against it by not only its users, but also numerous government entities and its own shareholders. Perhaps most notable, however, is a trial in California that is, as we speak, tied up in jury deliberations that have lasted more than a week, seemingly suggesting a deadlocked jury and the potential for a retrial.
That lawsuit is serving as a proxy and bellwether for more than 2,300 separate lawsuits brought against Meta in dozens of states by users, alleging that Meta intentionally designed its social media products such as Facebook and Instagram with algorithms meant to be addictive to the brains of minors in particular, contributing to youth mental health crises such as depression, anxiety and body dysmorphia. The unnamed plaintiff in the California case is known as “Kaley G.M.,” a now 20-year-old woman who testified that she began using social media at the age of six and quickly became addicted to it, leading to years of mental health damages. She took to the stand to tell her story, saying “I would just get really upset and sad and feel like I wasn’t worthy, I guess.” The lawsuit originally included the likes of TikTok and Snapchat as additional defendants, but both quietly settled with the family of the plaintiff before the trial.
Meta, on the other hand, has instead chosen to go to war, putting them in the intensely awkward scenario where they’re calling into question the credibility of a 20-year-old user and disparaging her, while simultaneously attempting to look empathetic toward her experience. Their attorneys have argued that the mental health struggles of “Kaley G.M.” are unrelated to social media and instead stem from the plaintiff’s family life and genetics, with a Meta spokesperson saying the following: “The question for the jury in Los Angeles is whether Instagram was a substantial factor in the plaintiff’s mental health struggles. The evidence will show she faced many significant, difficult challenges well before she ever used social media.” Because as we know, most people have never faced “significant, difficult challenges” from multiple different vectors in their lives.
“Her attorneys say she was preyed upon as a vulnerable user, but attorneys representing Meta and Google-owned YouTube have argued Kaley turned to their platforms as a coping mechanism or a means of escaping her mental health struggles.”
— Danny Groner (@dannygroner.bsky.social) Feb 26, 2026 at 6:10 PM
It has been, in short, a deeply influential and ridiculous trial, with the attorney of the plaintiff describing Meta as “a lion stalking a pack of vulnerable gazelles,” while at one point a different lawyer ended up being reprimanded for taking a selfie in the courtroom and was fined $1,100. Regardless, whatever the outcome ends up being, it will set massive legal precedents for the remaining thousands of similar cases that are waiting to potentially proceed against Meta.
And lest I sound like a broken record: There are so many other legal imbroglios facing the company as well, one wonders when Zuckerberg will ever have time to zip away to do some wakeboarding or attend a silent retreat. The Federal Trade Commission, for one, is still pursuing its appeal in its landmark antitrust lawsuit against Meta, in which a D.C. District Court judge ruled in favor of the company last November, saying that the FTC had failed to prove Meta currently holds a monopoly in the “personal social networking” market. Simultaneously, Meta has faced intense criticism in the last year following revelations of just how much of its advertising diverts to products or services the company knew were scams–according to an investigation from Reuters, “Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10 percent of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.” It has also been connected globally with the ever-evolving and increasingly costly world of pig butchering phishing operations, wherein users are enticed and entrapped by scammers operating on or advertising on Meta’s platforms.
If you use any of Meta’s programs and see scam ads, be aware that they’re making money from them.
” Reuters reports internal documents expose Meta acknowledging its pages are laced with scams.”
www.thedailybeast.com/leaked-docum…— Mary Hilton (@maryhilt.bsky.social) Nov 6, 2025 at 1:42 PM
Hell, there are so many legal pitfalls to reference here that it’s easy to forget to even mention one that has already attempted to levy a $1.3 billion fine against Meta. That fine comes from Ireland of all places, where the Irish Data Protection Commission found that the company had failed to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation when it “violated privacy rules by transferring personal data of European users to the United States without adequate data protection mechanisms.” Meta has yet to pay the hefty $1.3 billion fine first imposed in May of 2023, still in the process of appealing the decision, but who knows how many other European regulators could still follow suit on similar pieces of data-protection enforcement?
There’s no shortage of aggrieved parties out there who have taken aim at toppling various aspects of Zuckerberg’s social media house of cards. Has Meta finally become too unwieldy, too omnipresent, and too damaging to the social fabric for the world to tolerate? Or will it not stop until Instagram reels are broadcast directly into our prefrontal cortex while we sleep?
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