A New Mexico judge just did something rare: ordered the biggest social media company on earth to change how its apps actually work for kids, not just to write a check. On top of the $375 million a jury awarded in March, Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million, bringing the total to $942 million, and to rebuild parts of Facebook and Instagram for users under 18 in the state. The money matters. The app changes matter more.
The ruling caps how long teens in the state can scroll, silences notifications when kids are supposed to be sleeping or in school, and hides like counts unless a parent opts back in. It is, as New Mexico’s attorney general put it, a blueprint for holding social platforms accountable for the products they build.
But here’s the thing: a court can force a time cap. It can’t fix the feed.
New Mexico’s ruling is a genuinely important step, and it points exactly where the industry needs to go. The question it leaves open is whether the right response is more rules or a different design. The answer, we think, is both: rules set the floor, and design sets the ceiling.
The ruling forces what should have been a design decision
Read the four changes the judge ordered and you see a theory of harm: that the platforms’ incentives, not kids’ willpower, are what drive overuse. So the ruling targets the mechanisms directly.
- Age verification gets real. Meta must strengthen how it confirms users are over 18 in New Mexico. Everything else on the list is meaningless if a 13-year-old can simply type a different birth year.
- Teens get a combined 90 hours a month. That is roughly three hours a day across Facebook and Instagram, and it is enforced as a hard ceiling for users under 18 in the state.
- Most push notifications go quiet overnight and during school hours. The interruption loop, the pings that pull a kid back to the app, is turned off when it does the most damage.
- Like counts are hidden by default. Parents can turn them back on, but the public validation meter is no longer the first thing a teen sees. The social-comparison fuel is removed.
Each of these targets a real mechanism. None of them, on their own, changes what the feed is optimized for: time spent. A cap limits the hours, but every one of those hours still serves the same algorithm, trained to keep a thumb moving. Limits and quiet hours manage the edges. The center, the feed itself, keeps its original job.
What New Mexico gets right about how teens actually want to use their phones
The ruling is a rare case of regulation that reads like user research. Look at what it implicitly understands:
- Teens don’t need fewer reasons to check their phone. They need better ones. Quiet hours remove the negative pull. The deeper fix is giving kids something to check their phone for that feels like their own progress, not someone else’s highlight reel.
- The like is the engine. Hiding counts by default is the most forward-looking part of the ruling, because it attacks the validation loop rather than the clock. But hiding the meter doesn’t change the goal the meter was built to chase. The real shift is replacing “get liked” with “keep going.”
- Age verification is the foundation. Every other safeguard assumes it holds. The industry needs a way to be sure who it is actually serving, and parents deserve real control once that is known.
- Rules set the floor. Design sets the ceiling. New Mexico can require a 90-hour cap, but no court order can make an app rewarding to put down. That is a design choice, and it is the one that ultimately decides how a teen feels when they close the app.
Meta says it disagrees with the ruling and will appeal. Whatever the courts decide, the direction is set. The question for every social platform is no longer whether to design for wellbeing, but how seriously to take it. New Mexico just made that question impossible to ignore.
What the ruling actually requires
| Requirement | What it targets |
|---|---|
| Strengthened age verification | The loophole that lets every other safeguard be bypassed |
| 90-hour monthly cap across Facebook and Instagram | Time spent, the very metric the feed is optimized for |
| Most push notifications off overnight and during school hours | The interruption loop that pulls a kid back to the app |
| Like counts hidden by default | The public validation meter that fuels social comparison |
Read the list again and you’ll notice every item is a correction to the feed’s incentives rather than the feed itself. A cap limits the hours, but the hours that remain still serve an algorithm trained to keep a thumb moving. This is why the structural answer matters: a platform that never made time the product has nothing for a court to cap. Topick is built that way. It is topic-first, so you post what you actually do in real life, photography, cooking, running, and the only number that grows is your own streak. There are no like counts to hide, no algorithmic feed to optimize, and notifications exist to remind you of your momentum rather than interrupt it for someone else’s post. The mechanisms New Mexico had to regulate are not features Topick has.