Bernalillo Schools Attorney Sees Meta Verdict as Precedent for District's Social Media Lawsuit

A Santa Fe jury's decision to hit Meta with $375 million in civil penalties has given Bernalillo Public Schools' legal team something concrete to take into court: proof that New Mexico jurors are willing to hold the world's largest social media company accountable for harming children.

Brian S. Colón, managing partner at Albuquerque's Singleton Schreiber and former New Mexico state auditor, said the March 24 verdict in State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, Inc. speaks directly to the case his firm is building for BPS. The Santa Fe jury found Meta willfully violated the state's Unfair Practices Act and ordered the statutory maximum: $5,000 per violation, totaling $375 million. Days later, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million in combined compensatory and punitive damages against Meta and YouTube in the case of Kaley, a young California woman identified as K.G.M., who alleged she began using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 before developing anxiety and body dysmorphia. The LA jury assigned Meta 70 percent of the responsibility, with YouTube bearing the remaining 30 percent.

"We now have a sense of a jury's temperament on whether these social media platforms should be held to account because they negligently developed algorithms and systems that caused social media addiction and did not provide guardrails to protect our children," Colón said.

For Bernalillo families, those verdicts are more than distant headlines. BPS joined a consolidated lawsuit in December 2023 in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, suing Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube alongside school districts across the country. The complaint alleges the companies negligently engineered features that foster addiction and expose children to harmful content, driving a mental health crisis that has landed squarely inside BPS classrooms. The district is seeking unspecified punitive, compensatory, and statutory damages. It is also asking a court to declare the companies' conduct a public nuisance against children and to order the platforms to provide mental health counseling resources directly to affected youth. If BPS prevails, those resources could reduce the financial pressure on the district's own counseling budgets, and court-ordered platform changes could alter the digital environment students encounter every day.

The BPS Board of Education voted unanimously in June 2024 to authorize the legal services contract with Singleton Schreiber. Board President Paul Madrid framed the lawsuit in straightforward terms: "There's a lot of social media out there that affects and has affected student learning and behaviors in a derogatory manner for a long period of time. The hope with this litigation is the wrongs can be righted."

Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube have denied the claims and are demanding a jury trial. Colón said his team may cite the New Mexico and Los Angeles verdicts in future filings, but the immediate value is strategic: the outcomes "informs us as to how we present our strongest case," he said.

The pressure on Meta is not easing. A second phase of the New Mexico trial is scheduled for May 4, when a judge, without a jury, will determine whether Meta created a public nuisance and should be ordered to fund public programs to address the alleged harms. That hearing could produce the very remedy BPS is also pursuing, and its outcome will be closely watched in Bernalillo and school districts across the country still waiting for their day in court.