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A New Mexico judge spent his first morning of the Meta remedies trial signaling that he doesn’t plan to become “a one-person legislator, judge and executive branch enforcer,” and the privacy stakes of that reluctance run deeper than the child safety framing suggests.

The bench trial opened Monday in Santa Fe before First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedscheid, the second phase of a case that already produced a $375 million jury verdict against Meta (https://reclaimthenet.org/meta-youtube-negligence-verdict-age-verification-surveillance) in March.

State prosecutors now want the judge to rewrite how Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp operate inside New Mexico, with a remedy list that reaches well past algorithm tweaks into the architecture of identity verification and encrypted messaging itself.

Before opening statements, Biedscheid told both sides he held “some concerns” about the New Mexico Department of Justice’s proposals. “I’m probably not the easiest sell on an idea where I would become a one-person legislature, judge and executive branch enforcer of administrative code provisions,” he said.

The warning lands at a moment when several of the state’s requested fixes look like permanent surveillance infrastructure dressed up as protection. It start with age verification. The state wants Meta ordered to confirm the age of every New Mexico user, an obligation that cannot be met by asking people to type a birth year.

Meaningful age verification at the platform level means government IDs, facial scans, or third-party identity services that link a real legal identity to every account. Once that link exists, it does not unlink. The pseudonymous Instagram account becomes an identity-verified Instagram account, for adults and minors alike, in service of a check that only formally concerns the under-18 population.

The state is also demanding restrictions on end-to-end encryption for minors. Encryption does not have a child mode. A platform either holds the keys to your messages or it does not and once Meta is required to scan or filter the content of conversations involving anyone under 18, it builds the technical capability to scan everyone’s.

Prosecutors want bans on infinite scroll, autoplay, and push notifications during school and sleep hours for minors. They want Meta to identify underage users and detect at least 99 percent of all new child sexual abuse material on its platforms. They want a 90-hour monthly cap on access for New Mexico children and they want Biedscheid to appoint an independent monitor with ongoing authority to enforce whatever order he issues.

David Ackerman, a private civil attorney representing the state, told the court that prosecutors are also seeking $3.7 billion in restitution paid out over the next 15 years.

The award, he said, “recognizes the scope of the public nuisance that Meta has caused. There are items in this abatement plan for public education, to assist schools, to assist law enforcement, to assist mental health providers who are treating children who are suffering from the effects of their social media use. [This] is about preventing harm from occurring to additional New Mexico children, It’s about fixing the harm that already occurred to New Mexico children and their families.”

Meta’s lawyers responded that the state’s demands are “overbroad, vague, unworkable” and would compel speech, and the company has separately threatened to withdraw Facebook and Instagram from New Mexico rather than comply.

Meta attorney William Parkinson framed that threat as serious rather than performative. “This is not a PR stunt, this is not a threat,” he said.

The withdrawal warning serves Meta’s interests, but it also illustrates how difficult it is for a single state to impose platform-level identity verification and content-scanning mandates without effects that bleed across borders.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the case in 2023 after his office ran an undercover operation using a fake Instagram account presented as a 13-year-old girl, has rejected Meta’s claims of impossibility.

“Meta is showing the world how little it cares about child safety,” he said in a statement responding to the withdrawal threat. “Meta’s refusal to follow the laws that protect our kids tells you everything you need to know about this company and the character of its leaders. We know Meta has the ability to make these changes.”

Torrez has separately argued that the March jury verdict “punctured the aura of invincibility” that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has long provided to tech companies.

Consider what a 90-hour monthly access cap actually requires. To enforce it, Meta has to know, with legal certainty, which accounts belong to New Mexico minors. That means location tracking precise enough to distinguish a 17-year-old in Las Cruces from a 17-year-old visiting from El Paso, identity verification robust enough to survive legal challenge, and an account-linked usage clock that runs whether the user is on their phone, a friend’s laptop, or a school computer.

The cap cannot be implemented without comprehensive surveillance sitting underneath every New Mexico account. Build that surveillance for minors and it exists for everyone because the only way to know who the minors are is to verify everyone.

The 99 percent CSAM detection mandate sounds unobjectionable until you ask how it would be met. No human review process operates at that scale. The mandate is a demand for automated scanning of every image, video, and message posted by every user on the platform, calibrated to catch a category of material that automated systems are notoriously bad at distinguishing.

Platforms that have rolled out aggressive automated scanning have already silenced parents sharing photos with doctors, journalists reporting on conflict zones, and survivors documenting their own histories. A court-ordered 99 percent floor pushes the false-positive rate higher, and the people whose accounts get deleted by mistake have no realistic recourse.

The restrictions on encrypted messaging are the part of the proposal that should worry anyone who uses Signal, WhatsApp, iMessage, or any other end-to-end encrypted service.

The state is asking a court to order Meta to break, weaken, or bypass encryption for a subset of its users. There is no technical mechanism that does this only for minors. Whatever Meta builds to satisfy the order, client-side scanning, mandatory key escrow, and content inspection before encryption, becomes part of the product. It scans the journalist’s source, the abuse survivor talking to a counselor, and the political organizer in a country where organizing is dangerous. The mandate is presented as child protection but the capability it creates is general-purpose surveillance.

What Biedscheid signaled on Monday is important because the alternative to his restraint is a single trial court order, in a single state, becoming the template for how more than 40 other state attorneys general resolve their own pending Meta cases.

Bellwether trials are scheduled across 2026. A national identity verification regime imposed through public nuisance litigation would be a substantial shift in how Americans access social platforms, achieved without Congress voting on it, and one whose surveillance infrastructure would not disappear if a future court decided the harms it was meant to address had been overstated.

The trial is expected to run for three weeks. Meta has said it will appeal the underlying verdict regardless of how the remedies phase ends, meaning the privacy questions raised by the state’s proposed fixes will continue moving through the courts well past Santa Fe.

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The post New Mexico’s Meta Trial Opens with Judge Wary of State’s Broad Surveillance Demands (https://reclaimthenet.org/new-mexicos-meta-trial-opens-with-judge-wary-of-states-broad-surveillance-demands) appeared first on Reclaim The Net (https://reclaimthenet.org).