Meta has been ordered to pay $25 billion to the US state of New Mexico after a jury found that Facebook misled users for more than a decade about how their personal data was handled and shared with third parties.
State District Court Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty on Wednesday, following a jury finding in September that Meta had violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times, CNN reported. Hiru News, carrying foreign wire reports, put the number of violations at more than 40 million and said the conduct spanned 2010 to 2021.
The judge found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law before reducing the figure to $25 billion, according to the Hiru report.
Mathew criticised what he described as a “coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.”
“Facebook’s misrepresentations about users’ control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model,” he wrote.
The Cambridge Analytica origin
New Mexico sued Facebook in 2021, accusing it of mishandling state residents’ personal information and deceiving them about its policies. The case stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the British political consulting firm obtained data on millions of Facebook users and used it to build profiles of American voters. Meta disclosed in 2018 that the private information of as many as 87 million users had been improperly obtained.
Meta will appeal
Meta said it will appeal and accused the state attorney general of conflating privacy and speech issues.
“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,” chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said. “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.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the ruling showed that powerful technology companies cannot operate above the law, Hiru reported.
Part of a wider legal bill
The penalty lands on a company already absorbing large court costs. Meta reported September-quarter earnings the same day, posting lower profits than Wall Street expected and attributing the miss to a charge from an $18 billion multistate settlement agreed in August over claims its platforms addicted and harmed young people. New Mexico was not party to that settlement.
Meta posted income from operations of nearly $13 billion for the quarter, against nearly $23 billion it said it would have earned without the settlement charge. Revenue still grew 26% year-on-year to more than $64 billion, and the stock rose more than 3% in after-hours trading. The company was separately ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in another New Mexico case earlier this year over youth addiction and harm claims.
Not reported
The two filings differ on the violation count — CNN gives more than 43 million, Hiru more than 40 million — and neither explains the gap. No source states when the appeal will be filed or whether the penalty is stayed pending it. The case concerns New Mexico residents only; nothing in either filing bears on Sri Lankan Facebook users.
