Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: While it is still struggling in New Delhi to protect its multi-billion-dollar market driven by millions of users of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Meta is facing a heatwave not only in Australia and Europe but also its home ground: the United States.
A New Mexico court has ordered the Instagram and Facebook parent company to pay USD 567 million to address harms to young people from its platforms in the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March, the media reported on Friday.
In a ruling late Thursday, Judge Bryan Biedcheid said the bulk of the money – USD 420 million – will be used for treatment services for young people. The rest will go toward awareness and prevention, screening services and other costs over the next five years.
In the first phase, jurors had ordered USD 375 million in civil penalties against Meta, determining that it knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
In the second phase, prosecutors had asked the judge to impose fundamental changes at Meta aimed at reining in addictive features, improving age verification and preventing child sexual exploitation through default privacy settings and closer oversight.
The court said federal children’s privacy laws prevent Meta from applying age-verification tools to children under 13. The Children’s Online Privacy Act, or COPPA, means it cannot order Meta to request children to submit personal data or be passively tracked online, even for age verification purposes.
The court also noted that ordering Meta to verify children’s ages for only Meta and not other social media companies would be “inequitable and unduly injurious” to the company.
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India
Meta’s largest market worldwide by user numbers is India where over 800 million users of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, attracting advertisements, account for billions of dollars worth of annual business. Meta chief Marc Zuckerberg was forced to tender a written apology on Thursday to a parliamentary committee for blocking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Instagram post recently. The company’s platforms also admitted promoting sponsored anti-government and objectionable content.
While Meta officials are still sorting out the mess in New Delhi, India further tightened screws on Friday by slashing the online content takedown time for sensitive matters to 2 hours from the earlier 24 hours given to social media platforms.
According to an official statement, amendments were made on February 10, 2026, in the IT Rules 2021 to strengthen the regulatory framework to address harms arising from synthetically generated information (SGI), including deepfakes and AI-generated content.
“Strengthening of timelines for compliance, including reduced timelines for removal of unlawful information upon actual knowledge upon valid reasoned intimation from the Appropriate Government or court orders (timeline reduced from 36 hours to 3 hours) and for grievance redressal (including special categories such as nudity/impersonation etc) (timeline reduced from 72 hours to 36 hours and 24 hours to 2 hours for sensitive matters, respectively),” the statement said.
IT Rules mandate the significant social media intermediaries (SSMIs), platforms with over 50 lakh user base in India, to take reasonable efforts to deploy appropriate technical measures, including automated tools or other suitable mechanisms, to proactively identify information that depicts any act or simulation in any form depicting rape, child sexual abuse or conduct or any information which is similar in content to information that has previously been removed.
“In case of failure of the intermediaries to observe the legal obligations as provided in the IT Rules, they lose their exemption from third party information provided under section 79 of the IT Act. They are liable for consequential action or prosecution as provided under any extant law,” the statement said.