CVN screenshot of Dr. Randy Auerbach, a child psychiatry professor testifying as an expert witness on behalf of Meta
Santa Fe, New Mexico - A bench trial in New Mexico state court in a lawsuit filed by the state’s attorney general seeking billions from Facebook’s parent company Meta Platforms Inc. over claims its safety policies for minors pose a “public nuisance” to the community is expected to conclude Friday, and the full trial has been webcast and recorded gavel-to-gavel by Courtroom View Network.
Opening arguments in the non-jury trial commenced on May 4, and the proceeding comes on the heels of a historic $375 million verdict delivered by a Santa Fe jury earlier this year in a civil trial also recorded by CVN accusing Meta of violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act by withholding critical information from the public about levels of sexual exploitation on the platforms and their negative impacts on teens’ mental health.
The plaintiffs urged Judge Bryan Biedscheid to find the social media company liable for up to $3.7 billion in abatement costs to address the alleged harm to children’s mental health supposedly caused by the platform. However META, which argues the claims are unsupported by clinical evidence, presented an expert witness who suggested a more reasonable amount is $27 million.
Upon the conclusion of the trial, the full proceedings will be available to CVN video library subscribers, along with the previous New Mexico Meta trial and hundreds of other trials in a wide range of practice areas featuring many of the top civil trial attorneys in the United States. Not a subscriber? Sign up for a monthly or annual CVN membership and get instant access to the world’s only online video library of gavel-to-gavel civil trials.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez accuses META of failing to adequately protect children from sexual predators on the platform, and claims an emerging mental health crisis among adolescents in New Mexico can be directly traced to their social media use. In addition to potentially billions in abatement damages, his office has also proposed changes to fundamentally alter how social media platforms function that META said could result in all users from the state being blocked from the platform.
The plaintiffs seek heightened age verification features and limits on logged-in time for minor-owned accounts, but Meta has argued throughout trial argued it is impossible to distinguish impact from platforms like Facebook with the myriad other potentially harmful content children can encounter online.
With no jury hearing the case, Judge Biedscheid is expected to take the arguments under advisement upon Friday’s conclusion of trial proceedings, and his eventual ruling could have industry-wide consequences for Meta and other social media platforms which are facing related litigation throughout the country.
A major bellwether trial begins in June in California federal court, where video coverage is unfortunately prohibited, and additional trials could follow in state courts later this year.
Email David Siegel at dsiegel@cvn.com
