A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion on Wednesday after a jury found the company misled Facebook users about how it handled their personal data, according to Reuters. Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty following a September jury verdict that found Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act nearly 44 million times.
The Meta $25 billion penalty traces back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The now-defunct political consulting firm, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, pulled data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app, and none of those users agreed to hand it over, Reuters reported. The state estimates about 350,000 of them were New Mexicans.
What the lawsuit alleged
Then-New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas sued Facebook in 2021, three years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. He chose to go it alone instead of joining a multistate coalition, and current Attorney General Raúl Torrez took the case to trial. The state accused the company of lying to New Mexico Facebook users about who could see their information, how it handled hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies, according to Reuters.
A Santa Fe jury sided with the state, finding Meta violated the Unfair Practices Act in the way it portrayed its efforts to protect user privacy and combat misinformation and hate speech, Variety reported. Most outlets put the count at more than 43 million violations, a figure that lands just shy of 44 million.
The judge’s order
Mathew found that the scale of the violations justified the maximum penalty allowed under state law, $5,000 per violation, according to The Verge. He cited the number of willful violations, how long and how often the conduct occurred, the range of subjects involved and the participation of senior Facebook leadership.
At that rate, the penalties added up to more than $219 billion. Mathew then reduced the total to $25 billion, The Verge reported. The state had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion. In his order, Mathew wrote that “Facebook’s wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” according to Reuters.
Torrez called the judgment “one of the single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history.” “It has been a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable,” Torrez said at a news conference, according to Reuters. “I think today’s judgment is a clear break with that past and a very clear warning to those in this space and beyond that we intend to protect our people and protect our consumers.”
In a separate statement, Torrez said the case showed “no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” according to Variety. He added that New Mexico “stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law.”
Meta’s response
Meta disputed the ruling through C.J. Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer. “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said, according to Reuters. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”
Before the ruling, Meta told the court it has never sold user data and that the state never showed a single New Mexican was actually deceived. The company asked the judge to hold penalties to no more than $3.45 billion, Reuters reported.
Background and related cases
This marked the second jury verdict against Meta in six months in a case brought by New Mexico in front of a Santa Fe jury, according to Reuters. In an earlier trial that concluded in March, a jury found Meta had misled users about the safety of young people on its platforms, resulting in $375 million in civil penalties.
After a second phase of that earlier case, a judge ordered Meta in August to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and directed the company to take additional steps to protect teen users of Facebook and Instagram in the state, Reuters reported. That brought the total from the first case to $942 million.
New Mexico has also stood apart from other states. In August, Meta reached a settlement with 52 attorneys general over claims it built Instagram with addictive features, exposed young users to mental harms and misled the public about platform safety. State attorneys general valued the deal at up to $17.1 billion, while Meta’s own filings put the ceiling at about $18.59 billion. Roughly $5.3 billion of that depends on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar safety measures, The Verge reported.
Tucked inside that agreement was a separate payment of about $459 million to resolve Cambridge Analytica claims from 46 states and two U.S. territories. New Mexico declined to join, which is why its case went to trial.
What’s next
Meta has said it intends to appeal the $25 billion judgment, meaning the order is not final and the amount the company ultimately pays could change depending on the outcome.
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