A U.S. court has fined Meta $25 billion (about 33 trillion won), the largest penalty ever imposed on a Big Tech company. Meta said it would appeal immediately.
The district court in New Mexico imposed the fine on the 21st for violating consumer protection law in connection with the leak of Facebook user data during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The amount is five times the $5 billion penalty the Federal Trade Commission imposed on Facebook in 2019. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said the verdict ranked among the largest ever obtained by a state against a company in U.S. history, according to the Associated Press.
According to the ruling, Facebook failed to provide users with explanations about data protection and had inadequate safeguards in place. The court also found that the company did not carry out the responses it had promised even after the case came to light, and made false statements. Jurors concluded that Meta committed about 43.89 million violations of consumer protection law between 2010 and 2021. Applying the $5,000 per-violation penalty in full would have produced a total of about $220 billion, but the court deducted a substantial portion of that. Even so, the $25 billion fine amounts to about 40% of Meta's annual net profit.
Judge Francis Mathew, who presided over the case, said Facebook had promised users they could directly control their own data, and that this was false.
The case dates to the 2016 election in which U.S. President Donald Trump first won office. It became public in 2018, when it emerged that British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained data on as many as 87 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used the data to send political advertising selectively, tailored to users' personalities and interests.
Meta signaled it would appeal the ruling. According to Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the company said the decision would make it effectively impossible to operate in New Mexico, calling it an attempt to impose new rules on what people say online and to tax free expression.
In August, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to 48 U.S. state governments to settle this case and several lawsuits over youth safety measures, releasing it from legal liability. New Mexico, along with Florida, rejected that settlement and continued its own court fight. The New Mexico court also ordered Meta to pay $567 million (about 753.6 billion won) in the lawsuit over youth safety measures.