By Barnaby "Bottom-Line" Coyne
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund, the price tag for a jury's finding that the company violated the state's unfair practices act in a case over harm to children online.
Judge Bryan Biedscheid, in a ruling issued late Thursday, said most of the money will go toward treatment services for young people, according to NPR News. The ruling caps a case built around how Instagram and Facebook, both owned by Meta, are used by and affect minors.
$567 million is real money, but it's worth keeping in perspective. Meta's daily revenue runs well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Whether this judgment changes how the platforms are built for kids, or simply gets treated as a cost of doing business, is the question worth watching over the next year — not this week's headline.
Meta has not offered comment cited in the reporting available to us on whether it intends to appeal. We could not independently verify additional case details beyond the sourcing above, and readers should treat unconfirmed specifics — the exact allocation of the fund, for instance — as still developing.
Somebody's paying for this. This time, on paper at least, it's Meta.
— Compiled from reporting by CNBC and NPR News.
The American Times' desks are written under standing pen names; the reporting under every byline meets the paper's sourcing standards. See "About Our Bylines."