Meta Trial Phase 2 Opens: State Demands the Algorithm Be Rebuilt

Wooden judge gavel resting on a dark surface next to law books — Photo via Unsplash

TL;DR: The second phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms opened May 4 in Santa Fe’s First Judicial District. Judge Bryan Biedscheid is presiding over a three-week bench trial that will run through May 22. Phase 1 ended in March with a $375 million jury verdict; Phase 2 is where the actual product changes get decided. AG Raúl Torrez’s team (led on the trial side by Motley Rice attorney Linda Singer) walked through a remedies list that includes a 90-hour monthly platform cap for minors, the elimination of autoplay and infinite scroll for under-18s, suspension of push notifications during school hours and sleep, mandatory age verification, the rollback of end-to-end encryption for minor accounts, prominent risk warning labels, permanent bans for adults caught exploiting children, and a court-appointed safety monitor with access to Meta’s internal systems. The state is also asking for $3.7 billion to fund a 15-year teen mental health abatement plan. Meta’s pre-trial filing called the demands “technically infeasible” and warned the company may “withdraw Facebook and Instagram” from the state. One internal Meta document already in the record estimated end-to-end encryption would block roughly 7.5 million reports of child sexual abuse material per year. The judge has until late May or June to weigh it all.

The Room Where It Happens

No jury this time. Phase 1 ran for six weeks in front of twelve Santa Fe residents who came back with a verdict against Meta on every count. Phase 2 is a bench trial: just Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the same judge who presided over Phase 1, deciding both whether Meta’s platforms constitute a “public nuisance” under New Mexico law and what the company has to do about it ^[1].

That’s a different kind of trial. Public nuisance cases live or die on the remedy. The judge isn’t just deciding who’s right. He’s deciding what specifically a $1.5 trillion company is going to be ordered to change about a product used by half the planet. He has wide discretion. Whatever he writes into a final order in May or June becomes the template that 40-plus other state attorneys general (and over 1,300 school districts already in litigation) will copy ^[2].

The trial is scheduled to run through May 22. Meta has signaled it will appeal whatever Biedscheid orders, no matter what.

The State’s Remedies List, In Detail

Phase 2 is the first time the public has gotten a full look at what New Mexico is actually asking for. The list is long ^[3] ^[4] ^[5]:

A 90-hour monthly cap on platform time for users under 18. Hard ceiling. After 90 hours in a calendar month, the app stops serving content.
End of autoplay and infinite scroll for under-18 accounts. The two design patterns that exist specifically to keep users from putting the phone down.
Push notifications suspended during school hours and overnight. No engagement bait at 2:47 a.m. No interruption during fourth period.
Recommendation algorithms redesigned so they don’t optimize for engagement when the user is a minor. The state’s position: Meta knows how to build a feed that doesn’t serve self-harm content and doesn’t connect predators to children: it just chooses not to.
Mandatory age verification for New Mexico users, with a hard ban on accounts for kids under 13.
Rollback of end-to-end encryption for users under 18. Meta added end-to-end encryption to Instagram and Messenger DMs in 2023; the state wants minor accounts excluded so child-exploitation messages remain visible to Meta’s safety teams and to law enforcement.
Prominent warning labels on the platforms, modeled on the Surgeon General’s 2024 advisory recommending exactly that.
Permanent bans for any adult caught exploiting children on a Meta platform: no warning, no cooldown, no re-registration.
A court-appointed safety monitor with read access to Meta’s internal systems and a mandate of at least five years to verify compliance.
$3.7 billion abatement fund over 15 years to pay for teen mental health services in New Mexico.

The cash piece is large but it isn’t the news. The news is the structural list. If Biedscheid signs it, every other state AG with a pending case (California, Texas, New York, Tennessee, Utah, dozens of others) can drop it into their own injunctive-relief brief on day one.

The 7.5 Million Reports Number

The end-to-end encryption fight is going to dominate at least one trial day, and it landed in the record before opening statements. An internal Meta document already entered into evidence shows the company’s own employees calculated that turning on E2EE for messaging would impair Meta’s ability to disclose to law enforcement “roughly 7.5 million reports of child sexual abuse material per year” ^[3].

That’s Meta’s own number. Not the state’s. Not the FBI’s.

The political backdrop is brutal for Meta’s defense. The company removed end-to-end encryption from default Instagram DMs in May 2026, and the state plans to use that pivot as proof that Meta can selectively redesign its products when it wants to. New Mexico’s position is straightforward: if Meta could roll back encryption everywhere because of regulatory pressure, it can roll it back for under-18 accounts in one state.

Meta’s counter is that segmenting encryption by user age requires Meta to know each user’s age with a high degree of certainty, which loops back to the age verification fight. The two arguments cancel each other out, which is exactly what the state wants the judge to see.

Meta’s Defense: It’s Impossible

Meta’s pre-trial brief, filed late last week, set the tone for the company’s opening posture. The remedies New Mexico wants, the company argued, are “technologically impractical or completely impossible” and would force Meta “in the limit, to withdraw Facebook and Instagram” from the state altogether ^[4] ^[5].

The company added WhatsApp to the withdrawal threat list in subsequent filings.

From the brief: “The state’s proposed mandates infringe on parental rights and stifle free expression for all New Mexicans” ^[3]. Meta’s position is that age-gating, time caps, and algorithm redesigns aren’t targeted child-safety measures: they’re state-imposed limits on what every adult New Mexican can see on the apps. The First Amendment argument is going to surface repeatedly over the next three weeks.

On the technical infeasibility claim, Meta plans to call “an array of technical experts” to argue that a state-specific version of Instagram can’t exist ^[1]. The company’s position is that its platforms are global by architecture: you can’t fork the recommendation system, the notification stack, and the encryption layer for a single state without breaking the product for everyone.

The state’s rebuttal will be on the record by week two: Meta operates location-specific versions of Instagram in dozens of countries, including ones with far more aggressive content controls than New Mexico is asking for. The company already runs custom versions for Russia, Iran, China’s adjacent markets, the EU under the DSA, and the UK under the Online Safety Act. New Mexico’s position: if Meta can build a Saudi-compliant Instagram, it can build a New-Mexico-compliant one.

Torrez’s Frame: This Is What “We Care About Kids” Looks Like When You Mean It

AG Raúl Torrez has been speaking about Meta’s withdrawal threat for almost a week, and that messaging has been refined into the state’s opening argument. His core line, repeated in pre-trial press: Meta is “showing the world how little it cares about child safety” ^[6].

Torrez’s frame is that Meta’s pre-trial behavior (threatening to abandon 2.1 million New Mexicans rather than verify ages or disable autoplay for kids) is itself evidence of the company’s mindset. A company that genuinely cared about child safety would treat the state’s remedies list as a starting point for compromise. Meta is treating it as a hostage situation.

That’s a hard frame to argue against from a courtroom seat. Meta’s legal team has to convince Judge Biedscheid that the company simultaneously (a) takes child safety seriously, (b) has done everything reasonable to address it, and (c) cannot do any more without leaving the state. The state is going to spend three weeks pulling that triangle apart.

Who’s Trying It

The state’s lead trial counsel is Linda Singer of Motley Rice, the same plaintiff-side firm that ran the opioid mass-tort litigation against Purdue, Endo, and the distributors ^[7]. Motley Rice has been embedded with the New Mexico AG’s office on this case since the original 2023 filing. The Phase 1 trial team included partners David Ackerman, Donald Migliori, Lance Oliver, and Mike Pendell. Same crew is running Phase 2.

That detail matters. Public-nuisance trials against well-resourced corporate defendants are a genre. Motley Rice has built that genre. The remedies list New Mexico filed isn’t a wishlist: it’s the kind of structured-remedy proposal that public-nuisance courts have signed before in other industries.

The judge already knows the playbook too. Biedscheid presided over Phase 1 and watched the same trial team prove 75,000 violations of the state Unfair Practices Act. His comfort level with the state’s evidence is going to matter when the witnesses get technical.

What to Watch This Week

Days 2–5: State’s witnesses, expected to include child psychiatry experts, former Meta integrity-team employees, and at least one technical expert testifying that location-segmented platforms are routine.
End of week 1: First major fight over admissibility of internal Meta documents already used in Phase 1, including the 7.5 million CSAM-reports calculation.
Week 2: Meta’s defense case, including its “array of technical experts” on infeasibility.
Week 3: Closing arguments. No jury: Biedscheid issues a written ruling on his own timeline, likely weeks to months after closing.

The Bottom Line

Day one of Phase 2 confirmed what the pre-trial filings hinted at. New Mexico isn’t looking for a settlement. The state laid out a remedies list designed to gut the engagement architecture of Instagram and Facebook for any user under 18, then asked for a five-year court-appointed monitor to make sure Meta complies. Meta’s answer is that none of it is technically possible, and if the judge orders it anyway, the company will leave the state.

Both sides have three weeks to prove they mean it.

This is the case that’s going to set the national template for whether courts can force social media platforms to redesign themselves around child safety. We’ll be at it all month.

References

Published: May 4, 2026