A New Mexico state judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company liable last month for deceiving users about Facebook‘s data privacy and content moderation policies.
The judgment by state judge Francis Mathew capped a yearslong legal case waged by the state, which first sued the state in 2021 over alleged violations of its Unfair Practices Act following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The jury last month found that Meta had violated the law nearly 44 million times, including through how it depicted its efforts in protecting users’ privacy and how it combated misinformation and hate speech across Facebook.
Mathew initially ordered Meta to pay $219.4 billion, though he reduced that total to $25 billion. State Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s office described the decision as “one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history” in a press release on Wednesday.
“This is a historic day for New Mexico and for consumers across the country,” Torrez said in a statement. “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law. A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million violations of our consumer protection statute, and this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences. We took on one of the largest companies in the world because New Mexicans deserve honesty, accountability, and the protection of their personal information. Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”
Meta did not respond to an immediate request for comment. The verdict came hours before Meta’s third-quarter earnings report, and its stock rose about 2% after the decision.
Funds paid over consumer protection violations go toward the state’s education fund, according to the New Mexico Constitution. The company is expected to appeal.
The decision follows Meta’s $18 billion settlement with 52 state attorneys general in August over claims that it designed Instagram with addictive features, knowingly exposed young users to serious mental harms, and intentionally misled the public about the safety of its platforms, among other things.
The case stemmed from New Mexico’s claim that Facebook deceived users about the security of their data after a breach in a personality quiz exposed 87 million profiles’ information, which was sold to Cambridge Analytica to produce targeted ads. New Mexico had asked the court to award it between $35 billion and $40 billion, while Meta argued it shouldn’t have to pay more than $3.4 billion.
More to come…