A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving Facebook users about privacy a decade ago. Last month, the company was found liable for not being honest with users about a data breach involving Cambridge Analytica in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election.
A New Mexico jury found 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection law, and prosecutors sought the maximum penalty of $5,000 for each one. That would’ve resulted in a total judgment of about $215 billion. Meta lawyers argued the company should pay as little as $3.4 billion after the verdict.
Judge Francis Mathew handed down the $25 billion judgment, which Meta said it will appeal. Reached for comment, C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s Chief Legal Officer, told Gizmodo:
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. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal. In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe and free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal first broke in 2018, revealing that the firm, while working for President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, had acquired Facebook quiz data on about 87 million users that was then used to target potential voters. The firm closed up shop that same year, but the fallout has extended for a decade.
“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act – $5,000 per violation found by the jury,” Judge Mathew wrote Wednesday.
Meta has come under fire in recent years for other alleged transgressions, including addicting kids and causing mental health issues in teens with products like Instagram. But the headline numbers featuring large dollar amounts that Meta could pay out have never actually resulted in a judgment quite so high.
For example, after the start of a trial on social media addiction in August, it was believed that Meta could pay as much as $1.4 trillion, and countless news outlets ran with that number. We explained at the time that such a figure was “too big to succeed,” and a settlement with the 48 states was reached two weeks later for less than $20 billion.
As the AP notes, New Mexico and Florida were the only two states not to sign on to the roughly $18 billion settlement because they didn’t want to release Meta from any liability over the Cambridge Analytica case.
Money from consumer protection cases won by the state of New Mexico goes to funding schools, and the state Attorney General, Raul Torrez, reportedly said, “We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years.”
But it remains to be seen whether Meta will actually have to pay out the $25 billion ordered by a judge on Wednesday following an appeal, to say nothing of all the other current cases pending against Meta. Maybe we’ll know more in another decade.
