A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties for deceiving users about privacy on Facebook.
The ruling Wednesday by state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew came in the state’s landmark Cambridge Analytica case against Facebook for violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. It is the largest penalty against the tech giant to date.
The judge’s order followed a civil case in September in which jurors found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws. The company was accused of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data. The case was brought after political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election season.
“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” Mathew wrote in his ruling as reported by The Associated Press.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Mathew wrote.
“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” state Attorney General Raúl Torrez said at a news conference following Mathew’s ruling.
Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement to media outlets, “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 win on appeal.”
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission previously levied a $5 billion penalty against Meta in 2019 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.