What States Claim When They Sue Social Media Companies

In August 2026, a New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $567 million to address the effects of Instagram and Facebook on children’s mental health. The ruling came more than two years after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed suit alleging that Meta “knowingly exposes children to the twin dangers of sexual exploitation and mental health harm” for profit.

The case is one of several state-level lawsuits targeting social media companies over youth harms. A Los Angeles jury found Meta liable in March 2026 for contributing to an individual’s mental health deterioration. Multiple other states have pursued similar claims with mixed results.

What these cases share is a fundamental question: can a state hold a platform legally accountable for the psychological effects of its products, and what does it take to prove it? The answer depends on which legal theory a state uses, what evidence survives discovery, and how courts interpret the relationship between a company’s internal research and its public-facing decisions.

The legal theories states use

State attorneys general have pursued three primary legal theories against social media companies:

Public nuisance. This is the most common theory. A public nuisance interferes with a right shared by the general public — in this case, the public’s interest in protecting children from harm. The advantage is that it doesn’t require proving injury to a specific individual. The disadvantage is that it was designed for things like obstructed roads or contaminated water, not algorithmic content distribution. Courts have struggled to apply centuries-old nuisance doctrine to digital platforms.

Unfair or deceptive trade practices. Most states have consumer protection statutes that prohibit unfair business practices. New Mexico’s lawsuit invoked its Unfair Practices Act alongside the public nuisance claim. This theory argues that platforms deceived consumers — or the state acting on consumers’ behalf — about how safe their products were. It becomes stronger when internal documents show the company knew about harms but publicly denied them.

Negligence. Some cases allege that platforms failed to exercise reasonable care in designing features that affect children. This requires showing a duty of care, a breach of that duty, causation, and damages — the standard tort framework. The challenge is establishing that a platform owes a legal duty to protect users from psychological harm caused by content the platform didn’t create.

What New Mexico proved

New Mexico’s case proceeded in phases. The December 2023 filing alleged both sexual exploitation and mental health harms. By March 2026, a jury found Meta violated state law and ordered $375 million in penalties. The August 2026 ruling added another $567 million specifically tied to youth mental health effects and required operational changes including age verification improvements.

The state’s strongest evidence came from Meta’s own internal research. Documents leaked by former Meta employee Frances Haugen in 2021 — published as the “Facebook Files” by The Wall Street Journal — showed that Meta’s researchers had found Instagram worsened body image issues for one in three teen girls. Internal presentations acknowledged that the platform’s algorithms pushed engagement-optimizing content that could include material harmful to young users.

Haugen testified before the U.S. Senate on October 5, 2021, stating: “The company’s leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer, but won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people.” Her testimony and the accompanying documents gave prosecutors a paper trail connecting Meta’s internal knowledge to its external actions.

The evidence problem

Internal documents are powerful evidence for showing what a company knew. They are less useful for establishing what the platform actually caused.

The scientific literature on social media and adolescent mental health remains contested. Research indicates complex, often bidirectional links between digital media use and mental health outcomes, with causality largely unestablished. Excessive use correlates with anxiety, depression, ADHD symptoms, and sleep disruption — particularly among youth. But moderate use may offer social support and educational benefits.

Methodological challenges include inconsistent diagnostic criteria, low-quality evidence across many studies, and confounding variables like socioeconomic status. Some researchers argue that negative impacts are minimal or temporary, and that heavy social media use may be a symptom of underlying distress rather than its cause.

Academic Candice Odgers criticized the causal narrative in Nature, stating that evidence does not support the claim that digital technologies are “rewiring our children’s brains.” She suggested correlation might reflect reverse causation — teens who are already struggling may turn to social media more heavily — or other factors like the economic stress following the 2008 financial crisis.

This scientific uncertainty creates a tension in the courtroom. A state can prove that Meta’s researchers expressed concern about specific harms. It is harder to prove that those concerns describe effects large enough, and specific enough, to constitute legal injury under nuisance or consumer protection law.

What the rulings actually require

The New Mexico decisions went beyond monetary penalties. The August 2026 ruling required Meta to implement operational changes, including improved age verification and updates to how the platform protects young users. This is significant because it moves from retrospective punishment to prospective regulation through litigation.

Other jurisdictions have taken legislative approaches instead. Australia banned social media accounts for users under 16, effective December 2025. The UK enforced age verification requirements in July 2025 and announced a ban on under-16s starting spring 2027. France banned under-15s from social media platforms, effective September 2026. In the United States, Tennessee, Mississippi, Florida, and Ohio enacted state-level restrictions requiring parental consent or banning accounts for users under 14 or 16.

These legislative actions suggest a parallel track: where courts move slowly and require case-by-case proof, legislatures can impose blanket restrictions. The trade-off is that legislation doesn’t need to establish causation — it only needs political majority. Critics argue these laws infringe on privacy and free speech, potentially normalizing surveillance infrastructure to verify ages.

What remains unresolved

Several questions persist:

Causation at scale. Even if social media contributes to mental health harms for some users, establishing that contribution as a legal injury requires connecting platform design decisions to measurable outcomes across populations. The scientific literature hasn’t settled on effect sizes, mechanisms, or which features are most harmful.

The remedy question. Monetary penalties and court-ordered design changes assume that platforms can be directed toward safer configurations without destroying the features users value. Meta has appealed the New Mexico rulings, arguing that the requirements are both legally unsupported and technically infeasible at scale.

The research gap. Much of what states know about platform effects comes from leaked internal documents rather than transparent, independently verifiable research. Meta’s own studies were proprietary. Academic researchers lack access to the platform data needed to study algorithmic effects systematically. This means the public debate about harms proceeds partly on evidence that neither side can fully audit.

The international divergence. Countries are taking different approaches — from litigation (United States) to age bans (Australia, UK, France) to parental consent requirements (Brazil). There is no coordinated framework for evaluating platform effects on youth, which means a finding in New Mexico doesn’t necessarily translate to regulatory action elsewhere.

Why the case matters beyond Meta

The New Mexico lawsuit establishes a template other states can follow. Public nuisance combined with unfair trade practices gives attorneys general flexibility to argue both that platforms created a broad public harm and that they deceived consumers about the nature of that harm. Internal documents provide the smoking gun for the deception claim.

But the template also exposes the limits of litigation as a tool for platform accountability. Courts are not equipped to resolve questions about algorithmic design, developmental psychology, or the appropriate balance between connectivity and protection. They can order penalties and mandate changes. They cannot determine whether those changes will actually reduce harm, or whether the restrictions themselves create new problems — like pushing young users to less regulated platforms with fewer safety features.

The $567 million figure is a data point in an ongoing negotiation about what social media companies owe to their youngest users. The legal theory is settled enough to produce verdicts. The underlying science is not. And until those two tracks converge, each new ruling will be both a precedent and an open question.