A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta, the company that owns Facebook, to pay $25 billion for misleading users about how it handled their private data. The ruling was announced on Wednesday. It is one of the largest financial penalties ever given to a company in US history.
A jury found last month that Meta broke the state’s consumer protection law more than 43 million times. The jury said Facebook lied to users in New Mexico about who could see their personal information. It also said the company misled users about how it deals with hate speech and harmful content.
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2018, Facebook admitted that data from up to 87 million users had been taken by Cambridge Analytica, a British firm that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign. The data was used to build profiles of American voters. New Mexico sued Meta in 2021. The jury examined 26 public statements made by Meta leaders, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, between 2010 and 2021.
Judge Francis Mathew said Facebook’s false claims were not one-off mistakes. He called them a “systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model”. State law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation. At that rate, the full amount came to $219.5 billion. The judge reduced it to $25 billion.
Under state law, the money will go to New Mexico’s schools. The fine is more than twice the state’s entire annual budget. Until Meta pays, the amount will grow by 15 per cent interest every year. That adds about $3.75 billion a year.
Meta said it will appeal. Its chief legal officer, C. J. Mahoney, said the ruling “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico”. He said the case was, at its core, “a tax on speech”. He added that the company is confident it will win on appeal.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez welcomed the ruling. He said it shows that “no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable”.
This is not Meta’s first huge privacy bill. In 2019, the company paid a $5 billion penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission over the same Cambridge Analytica scandal. Legal pressure on the world’s biggest technology companies is growing on several fronts. This week, the White House also threatened the news outlet Politico with “consequences” unless it retracts its reporting, a fight you can read about here.
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