A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion on Wednesday after a jury found the company had misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.
"Facebook's wrongdoing -- over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public -- goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order following the verdict.
Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion.
A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The state's attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation posted on the platform and other internal policies.
The company knew that third parties had broad access to users' personal data, and it tolerated hate speech or other harmful content when it benefited the company's bottom line, the state said.
RESIDENTS MISLED ABOUT PRIVACY
Jurors on Sept 25 found that 26 of 29 statements made by the company and its leadership on those issues were misleading.
They said the company had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, based on the number of Facebook users or New Mexico residents who were the audience for each misleading statement.
State law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation, and directs that all of the money go to New Mexico's school system, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez told reporters after the verdict.
At a hearing on Oct 1, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, had asked Mathew to award the state between $35 billion and $40 billion, saying that would be supported by the US Constitution's protections on due process and the jury's verdict.
"This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," McGinn said.
In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion, saying a higher penalty ran the risk of scaring businesses out of the state. The evidence showed that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings.
TWO JURIES SIDED WITH STATE
The verdict was the second in six months by a Santa Fe jury in a lawsuit brought by the state of New Mexico against Meta Platforms.
In the first trial, which ended in March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta misled users about young users’ safety on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties.
After a second phase of that trial, a judge directed the company to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and ordered Meta to implement measures to protect teen Facebook and Instagram users in New Mexico.