Meta's public nuisance case in New Mexico has billion-dollar consequences

Meta says it may be forced to pull Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from New Mexico if the attorney general gets his way. The state is demanding a host of changes that the company says are impossible to achieve. After winning a $375 million jury award against Meta in a trial that argued the company misled users in the state about the safety of its products, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez is asking the state court to order sweeping changes to the platforms. Among the asks are a prohibition on end-to-end encryption for minors, implementing age verification, and detecting 99 percent of new child sexual abuse material uploaded to its services. “Fundamentally, many of the requests are so hopelessly vague or ambiguous that enforcing them would violate Meta’s due process rights to know what would, and what would not, violate the injunction,” Meta says in a filing to the court. It calls several requests “technologically or practically infeasible” and says it would need to build New Mexico-specific apps to comply. “Therefore, granting this onerous relief could compel Meta to entirely withdraw Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from the State as the only feasible means of compliance.” A couple examples of the AG’s proposed impossible tasks, according to Meta, are the mandates it achieve a 99 percent accuracy rate for detecting new CSAM and rejecting underage accounts. No matter what threshold the state set for CSAM detection, the company writes in the filing, “Meta would ne