Court Deems Meta a 'Public Nuisance,' a First for Social Media

Good morning!

On Thursday, the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico issued a decision in the remedies phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc. The court found Meta created a public nuisance by contributing to the youth mental health crisis and by facilitating child sexual exploitation. It ordered a range of remedies, including that Meta pay $567 million to create an abatement fund to finance various measures intended to address the harms to the public.

“In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety in and throughout the state, and that Meta’s platforms are a significant contributing cause to the crisis,” wrote Chief Judge Bryan Biedscheid in the decision.

I covered the immediate news of the ruling on Thursday. On Friday, we had the privilege of publishing a piece by Nathaniel Lubin, founder of Survey 160, Incite Studio, and the Better Internet Initiative and an expert witness in the case. He wrote about what the ruling means: for the first time, a social media platform was found to have created a "public nuisance." The finding, he writes, establishes that platforms may be held responsible for their products' effects.

“Judge Bryan Biedscheid’s decision is nuanced, and gives important procedural wins to Meta (which says it will appeal),” Lubin writes. “While the enforcement set by the court will not solve every problem posed by social media in New Mexico, if scaled more broadly to other geographies and jurisdictions it will meaningfully change Meta’s management incentives.”

More on children’s online safety

• The Center for Democracy and Technology Europe's Christian Cirhigiriand Marie Seck welcome the EU Special Panel on Child Safety Online's focus on children's rights and platform responsibility—but argue "safety by design" is left undefined, with no clarity on who decides when a platform is actually safe. “The emphasis on centering children's rights, safety by design and placing the onus of platforms to make their services inherently safer are recommendations we strongly support. However, the report's conclusions have some blind spots, or more worryingly, make recommendations that may undermine the rights of all users.”
• The Senate Commerce Committee advanced four bills Wednesday aimed at protecting children online, including the latest version of the controversial Kids Online Safety Act, reports Yuqing Liu for Tech Policy Press, who attended the hearing. “Although the committee’s approval moves the bills closer to a full Senate vote, their prospects remain uncertain in the House, where a prior version of the Kids Online Safety Act stalled after overwhelmingly passing the Senate in the previous Congress.”
• The GUARD Act's definition of an "AI companion" is broad enough to sweep in ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, argues Dr. Sameer Hinduja, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University. He makes the case for six fixes that tie regulation to what a product does, not its app-store label. “A child confiding in an AI chatbot designed to feel like a best friend or a romantic partner is in a very different situation from a child asking an AI assistant to proofread a school essay. One bill now moving through Congress does not draw that line,” he writes.

Europe and the summer of enforcement

• Peter Chapman of the Knight-Georgetown Institute writes that July may be remembered as a turning point for the EU's Digital Services Act, as the European Commission's enforcement actions began to clarify how the law's broad obligations apply to platform design. “July did more than just accelerate the pace of DSA enforcement: it began to concretize how platforms can turn the DSA’s broad design principles into specific product features that advance safety,” he writes.
• Over a hundred academics asked Ireland to recuse itself from EU digital and tax files during its Council presidency. Article 19's Mark Dempsey and Columbia World Projects' Anna Marchese argue Ireland should welcome the scrutiny. “The issue is not whether Ireland can completely insulate itself from corporate lobbying—no democracy can—but whether it is willing to manage institutions and make public commitments that inspire confidence in the impartiality of its decisions,” they write.
• The EU AI Act's transparency rules are live—but WITNESS's Bruna Santos and Jacobo Castellanos warn the exemptions could quietly hand the loudest producers of synthetic media a pass.

AI sycophancy and “synthetic discrimination”

• Tech Policy Press fellow Jake Laperruque opens a three-part series on AI in policing by asking an underexamined question: if AI systems are trained to tell users what they want to hear, what happens when those users are cops and prosecutors?
• In the latest entry in the Hype Studies series on Tech Policy Press, philosopher of technology and media scholar Eugenia Stambolievwrites that AI hype operates as "a gendered regime of visibility," normalizing synthetic images of women while erasing real women from view. “The more these infrastructures become embedded within everyday life, the more urgently democratic societies must ask what forms of participation they make possible, whose visibility they secure, and whose disappearance they render tolerable.”

Who draws the lines?

• Tulane University assistant professor Muira McCammon documented how Google turned off reviews for 90+ ICE detention facilities, erasing accounts of conditions inside. Google says disabling ICE facility reviews was "unrelated to a government request." But McCammon argues the effect is the same: dissent rendered invisible.
• Google's policy plan offers lawmakers a map of AI harm, writes Gregory Gondwe, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama and a faculty associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. It puts frontier threats at the center and more familiar structural harms at the edges. “The difficulty is that most existing laws are designed to identify a specific act, a clearly injured person, and a responsible institution,” he writes.
• As opposition to data centers grows across the United States, the tech industry is "pulling from tried-and-tested playbooks" to bypass it, write Dean Jackson, contributing editor at Tech Policy Press, and Samantha Totoni, research director for the University of Pittsburgh Communication Technology Research Lab—from nonprofit front groups to super PACs to tightly managed public forums.
• Deal structure is now a tool for AI firms dodging merger control, writes Aishwarya Vaithyanathan of the Digital Policy Alert. Minority stakes and compute commitments deliver much of an acquisition for tech firms without triggering regulators.

The infrastructure of democracy

• Brazil is requiring tech platforms with over 5 million users to disclose how they fight election disinformation and AI-generated political content by Aug. 16, writes Laís Martins. The open question: can the Electoral Court enforce it?
• Debate over election security is dominated by disinformation and deepfakes, but the technical fragility of election infrastructure has gone under-resourced, writes CaraDem's Moira Whelan. AI, she argues, doesn't create that problem—it makes fixing it urgent. “The threat is no longer only that a malicious actor deliberately targets an election system; it's that election-adjacent infrastructure could be damaged or exposed by an AI system pursuing an unrelated goal that simply happened to be in its path,” she writes.

AI safety and ‘sovereignty’

• Pre-release security review of frontier models is reasonable in principle, argues Michelle De Mooy, principal of de/Mooy Consulting. But a framework kept secret, with no published criteria or timelines, risks becoming a tool for executive discretion rather than governance. The Trump administration should provide answers, she says.
• Almost every LLM that reaches a broad audience is quantized—compressed to run cheaply. Emilio Ferrara, professor of computer science at the University of Southern California, argues this compression is treated as a safety nonevent, when it should be treated as a change to the deployed system. This has policy implications, he says.
• Sovereign AI budgets are growing faster than the analyses behind them. Joel Christoph, a technology and human rights fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center, argues that governments should ask how much bargaining leverage each public dollar buys, and stop calling the rest sovereignty. “Much of the current argument about AI sovereignty concerns whether it is desirable or attainable. Analysts debate definitions while ministers announce multi-year packages. Very little of this gives a finance ministry anything usable when two proposals compete for the same money,” he writes.

Don’t miss our monthly roundups on US and global tech policy developments

• In Washington, July saw a flurry of new reports, announcements, and events that continued to put questions around AI and security at the fore. More in the July US tech policy roundup from Freedman Consulting & Tech Policy Press.
• From a €550M AliExpress fine to France's under-15 social media ban to a German ruling against an AI music generator, July was a busy month for digital regulators. Digital Policy Alert’s Maria Buza and Aishwarya Vaithyanathan round up the highlights across the G20.

The United States of Oligarchy

• On this week’s podcast, you’ll hear from Casey Michel, author of United States of Oligarchy: HowAmerica's Wealthiest Ally with Dictators, Weaken the US, and Destroy Democracy, a new book out this week from St. Martin’s Press, about how a few of the wealthiest Americans seized the commanding heights of government—and what it will take to break their grip. Listen to the podcast here.

What we’re watching

The fallout from the disclosures of various cybersecurity incidents associated with autonomous AI agents (including new disclosures about Anthropic and Moonshot’s Kimi 3) continues to drive debate over the future of AI policy and security. If you haven’t yet listened to the OpenAI presentation about the Hugging Face incident from last week’s Black Hat convention in Las Vegas, I recommend it as a particular artifact worth studying.

We welcome submissions on this and other topics—guidelines here. I will note that we’re receiving more submissions than ever before, which means we have to say 'no' more than ever before; pieces with a strong analytical angle that are tied to current news events stand a better chance of reaching our pages.

I wish you the best for the week ahead!

-Justin