‘Facebook’s wrongdoing’: Why has Meta been fined $25bn in New Mexico?

The tech giant has been accused of misleading users regarding data privacy linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta Platforms to pay the US state $25bn after a court found the company intentionally misled consumers about the privacy of their data.

“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, which came more than three weeks after the verdict.

The judge found that a penalty of more than $219bn was warranted based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25bn.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against ⁠a company in United States history.

CJ Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said the company was confident it would win on appeal.

“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,” Mahoney said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech ‌to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”

What is the lawsuit about?

New Mexico’s attorney general sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.

Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm, harvested Facebook data to generate targeted political advertisements during the 2016 election season, when it worked for Donald Trump’s successful presidential campaign.

The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data and its handling of hate speech ⁠and misinformation posted on the platform.

Lawyers for the state cited a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company did not sell user data.

They alleged the company knew third parties had broad access to users’ data and tolerated hate speech ⁠or other harmful content when it benefitted the company’s bottom line.

Torrez, New Mexico’s attorney general, said the judgement “should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley”.

Meta is facing thousands of lawsuits and pressure from lawmakers over the impact of Instagram and Facebook on teen mental health.

A trial brought by a coalition of state attorneys general in a California federal court began in August over claims the company engineered Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children, which could expose the company to huge damages and force it to make sweeping changes to its platforms.

It will also address claims by 29 states that the company illegally collected and used children’s data in violation of federal law.

Six other states settled their lawsuits related to Cambridge Analytica for $459m, as part of a $17bn multistate ‌settlement Meta reached in August to resolve states’ claims that the company’s platforms had harmed teen mental health.

Earlier this year, New Mexico won $942m in two trials against Meta over claims it ⁠facilitated sexual exploitation of young people on Instagram and Facebook and misled consumers about the platforms’ safety.

The American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit that supports stronger policies towards corporations, said the latest fine of $25bn is “a drop in the bucket for Meta”, but demonstrates that people want accountability.

“Right now, they are rolling out Muse, an AI assistant encouraging people to trust it with everything from their bank accounts to their medical information,” the nonprofit’s Executive Director Nidhi Hegde said. “Which is why we need more enforcers with courage and laws with actual teeth to rein them in.”