Zuckerberg’s court loss is the ‘Big Tobacco’ moment for Big Tech

March 25, 2026 — 3:05pm

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The same algorithms that make Meta brilliant at selling you running shoes are equally effective at connecting predators with children. That’s not some activist’s claim, it’s what Meta’s own former engineering director told a New Mexico jury – and they believed him.

After a bruising seven-week trial, jurors found overnight that Meta violated state consumer protection law by concealing what it knew about child sexual exploitation and mental health harms on Facebook and Instagram. They ruled the company made false and misleading statements and engaged in “unconscionable” trade practices that exploited the vulnerabilities of children.

The judgment, which imposed a $US375 million ($536 million) fine on Meta, is a landmark moment for the social media giant, and for every technology platform that has treated child safety as a mere reputational problem to be managed, rather than an engineering challenge to be taken seriously.

The New Mexico case began when state Attorney General Raúl Torrez ran an undercover operation in 2023, creating a fake profile of a 13-year-old girl. The account was, in Torrez’s words, “simply inundated” with sexual solicitations from predators. Three arrests followed, and the trial ultimately exposed a corporate culture where safety concerns were systematically subordinated to growth ambitions.

The testimony was damning: former Meta engineering director Arturo Bejar told the court he raised alarms after his own 14-year-old daughter received sexual solicitations on Instagram. Former Meta vice president Brian Boland testified he “absolutely did not believe that safety was a priority” under chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and then-chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg when he departed the company in 2020.

[Mark] Zuckerberg is developing an AI CEO agent to help him run Meta. It will hopefully have a bit more humanity.

Then there was Zuckerberg himself. In a pre-recorded deposition played to the jury, the Meta boss was confronted with 15 years of internal communications and user complaints........

© Brisbane Times