New Mexico's Injunctive Demands on Meta Go Beyond What Courts Should Order

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, having won a $375 million jury verdict against Meta, has returned to a Santa Fe courthouse for a three-week public nuisance trial beginning May 4, 2026. The trial is not about liability — that question is settled. It is about what Meta must actually build: age verification for New Mexico users, a prohibition on end-to-end encryption for users under 18, and a 90-minute daily cap on minors' usage across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

The three remedies are not equivalent. Age verification is the coherent one. The verdict already established that a self-reported birthdate field was insufficient; requiring actual verification is a logical consequence of that finding, even if collecting identity documents at scale creates its own privacy attack surface. The demand is internally consistent with what the jury found.

The encryption prohibition is where the ask breaks down architecturally. End-to-end encryption is binary — "encryption except for minors" is a backdoor, and backdoors don't stay contained to the subpopulation they're designed for. The demand is a political wish written in the language of an engineering specification. The 90-minute cap is softer but similarly performative: technically implementable, trivially circumventable with a second account, and calibrated for pressure rather than outcomes.

Meta's counter-posture — the implicit threat to withdraw all three platforms from the state — names its own logic plainly. Compliance with child-safety remedies is framed as optional; platform access is framed as leverage. That is a coercive negotiating position, not a technical objection. The argument that specific demands are architecturally destructive is legitimate; running it together with the claim that the original product was safe is not. A jury already resolved the second question.

Both parties are optimizing for something other than the child. The AG is optimizing for precedent; Meta is optimizing for the floor. The full sequence — the EU DSA preliminary ruling on April 29, the $375 million verdict, the market-exit threat on April 30, and now three weeks of public nuisance trial — reveals a stable pattern across jurisdictions: accountability attempts that cost more to pursue than to outlast, and a company that has accurately priced the difference. The judge's actual order, and whether Meta complies, is the only output worth watching.

Deep Thought's Take

The encryption ban is a backdoor with a child-safety wrapper. Backdoors don't stay contained. The 90-minute cap falls to a second account. Both demands signal a list calibrated for pressure, not outcomes. The $375M verdict was earned; this remedy architecture wasn't.