Article By Dan Frieth
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.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
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.
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?
Carrier records and app store accounts are where the current wave of age-verification law is being built. The KIDS Act passed the House on June 29, 2026, and would have platforms collect government IDs, run facial scans, or profile how you behave online to sort minors from adults. It is in the Senate now, where senators have said it has little chance in its current form, and there is active negotiation over bolting the language onto a wider effort to preempt state AI laws.
What Biedscheid did order on age came from Meta. He adopted the company’s own proposed relief, calling it “far from ideal or sufficient” and, all the same, “most appropriate.” Meta must keep improving its age assurance models in New Mexico using AI tools, and must attempt within two years to build “a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model (using reasonable best efforts in light of COPPA limitations).” Where it cannot estimate a precise age, it must treat the user as under 13 or under 18 until they verify. And “verify” here likely means adults have to show ID to speak online, even though Judge Biedscheid said he wasn’t mandating that.
Meta must also delete the personal information it has already collected on under-13s, and build a portal with schools or a child safety organization for flagging suspected underage accounts.
Age verification, the court wrote, “is the key to making Meta’s platforms safe for adolescents,” because without substantial certainty adults will talk to adolescents by claiming a false younger age. So a judge who found he could not lawfully ask a child for data told the company to get better at working out which users are children without asking them. He then capped how long minors can use the apps and silenced their notifications by the clock. A court has ordered a platform to profile its users more accurately and to police them by the hour.
Users near 18 are the easy case. The court said Meta can sort them based on the “signal” they give off through internet activity and identification, “such as a driver’s license, passport, and consumer history.” The company can already work out who is an adult from what it holds, and the ruling takes that as given.
The money runs over five years, with $420 million of it going to treatment and the rest to awareness, prevention, screening, referral and evaluation. It comes on top of the March penalties. Meta reports its progress to the court and the state by June 30 and December 31 each year.
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