New Mexico has a plan to reform Facebook and Instagram

Latest news Jury verdict of $375 million against Meta, the office of the attorney general of New Mexico Raul Torrez began to argue to ask more questions in the second part of the unforgettable trial. On Monday, the state’s attorney, David Ackerman, forced a federal judge to impose a $3.7 billion settlement that would require Meta to pay for mental health services, law enforcement, and teachers. Other requests include changes to Meta’s services – such as age verification, a 99 percent detection rate for new child sexual abuse (CSAM), and no more late-night or school-based notifications for youth in the state.

In an opening statement, the state said the plan is the only way to end the safety and health problems that Meta poses to New Mexico’s children. The plan “recognizes the extent of the social problems Meta has caused,” Ackerman said. Meta, on the other hand, said the AG’s requests are so difficult and impossible that he has no choice but to respond. leave the whole world if Judge Bryan Biedscheid forced it to follow the order.

Biedscheid indicated that he also has reservations. While he wants to address any issues that have been identified, he said, “he’s not going to sell easily on the idea of ​​me being a single person in the legislature, a judge, and the head of the administration.” Although he said he was ready to learn more during the trial, he worried that some of the international requests “could be fraudulent.”

Whatever Biedscheid chooses may indicate that the judge is willing to go to great lengths to address a social problem. There are thousands more of other lawsuits pending against media companies on similar grounds, and such judgments may serve as a reference point for discussions.

In March, a Santa Fe jury determined that Meta was guilty of 75,000 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, finding that it had misled users about the safety of its products for young people and engaged in commercial negligence by supporting child abductors in its operations. In the second part of the case, Biedscheid will consider whether Meta’s actions went beyond harming individual users, and caused a serious problem for the general public. They will also choose the right treatment. This could be from the government’s major changes to the gradual reform that Meta is planning – which includes providing funding for training on cybercrime, and committing to improve age verification methods to identify children under 13.

Because he presided over the first part of the trial, Biedscheid warned the parties that they “have nothing.” Even under what he called a “restrictive definition of civil penalty calculation,” the jury found that Meta’s thousands of violations were eligible for a maximum penalty of $5,000 each. But he said he’s well aware of the First Amendment objections that could come with other ideas, as well as the issues he might face with Section 230, the law that protects social media companies from being prosecuted for user speech.

In his opening statement, Mr. Ackerman, the prosecutor, told the judge that Meta would not do anything to solve his problems until he was “forced to do so.” “It cannot be the case that protection is only used if there is a trial or if there is one Wall Street Journal Ackerman also said the judge has “a lot of power and flexibility” to deal with mental health problems that he said are “exacerbated by social media.”

The government also addressed criticisms of the proposed solutions. Ackerman told the judge that he was not asking the court to “impose an age-verification system,” but “a list” of options that, when combined together, would increase competency. Meta’s concern that the 99 percent rate of identifying new CSAMs is unattainable, according to Ackerman, is a child welfare court lowering the standard if it thinks Meta has done its best. And despite the privacy concerns raised by de-encryption, Ackerman said, “the danger to children of encrypted messages outweighs the privacy concerns of these people.”

Meta’s attorney Alex Parkinson admitted that he will not try to challenge the jury’s findings in this part of the trial, and said the company “doesn’t minimize the importance of the health of young people.” But “the proposed government assistance is excessive, unreasonable, unreasonable, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” Pakinson said. “I just learned for the first time that a manager can change a policy on the fly. That doesn’t make sense.”

Parkinson accused the government of trying to “triple jump,” by allowing any citizen to destroy Meta, and allowing the AG to carry out the unjust actions that he claims he won in the first phase, and the public nuisances that require the second phase. After the multimillion-dollar jury award, “further expansion is unnecessary, and I’m calling for the law to be stretched beyond what it can bear,” he said.

The government’s proposal has run into legal issues that have stymied Meta’s plans in the past, Parkinson said — age verification, for example, could run afoul of the government’s children’s privacy laws. Parkinson insisted that contrary to what the government said, what Meta is saying is that he may need to leave the government and away from PR. And unlike the factory air pollution that everyone needs to breathe, he said, TV users can simply turn off programs for weeks at a time, he said.

He added a factory analogy to argue that the $3.7 billion “underlying consequences” of Meta’s behavior are illegal. Financial aid should be like “making you pay to build a fire filter, not to build hospitals for 15 years to protect the health of the people who breathe the air,” Parkinson said. “These people have a claim to be hurt.”

After opening the documents, the government called its first two witnesses. The first was New Mexico’s chief suicide prevention officer, who testified about a radio station and other youth health issues. The second was a special agent who had been investigating cases of child abuse. After the weeks-long trial, Biedscheid will need to know whether Meta’s actions have affected all communities, and what he can do next.