Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion for Misleading Facebook Users in New Mexico
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion civil penalty for misleading Facebook users about their privacy and hate speech policies, according to Bloomberg. A jury found more than 43 million violations of state law in September, leading to one of the largest verdicts in U.S. legal history.
The case stemmed from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a political consulting firm accessed data from up to 87 million Facebook users. The state argued that certain high-profile accounts received less scrutiny under Meta’s hate speech rules.
Judge Francis Mathew imposed the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation, which totaled $219 billion, but reduced it to $25 billion. The state had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion, while Meta’s legal team argued for a maximum of $3.4 billion, as reported by the Associated Press.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Mathew stated.
Meta plans to appeal the ruling. Its lawyers claimed that a penalty in the tens of billions would represent a “constitutional violation of epic proportions.” They also contended that the jury did not establish that anyone in New Mexico had seen the misleading statements or was harmed.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who initiated the case in 2021, described the penalty as “one of the single largest, if not the largest, single-state verdict against a company in American history.” He indicated that the funds would be allocated to a state education fund.
The $25 billion penalty exceeds the $14.8 billion in general-fund revenue that New Mexico anticipates for fiscal 2028. It also surpasses the approximately $18 billion Meta agreed to pay in August to settle claims from most U.S. states regarding harm to young users.
New Mexico opted to pursue its case independently, despite Meta’s warnings that it might withdraw from the state over its child safety demands. Earlier, the state secured $375 million from Meta in a child safety trial in March, along with a court order for $567 million to be deposited into a teen health fund.
Meta has faced significant financial repercussions related to the Cambridge Analytica incident before, including a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 and a $725 million settlement to resolve a class action lawsuit in 2022.
Source: The Next Web