Judge orders Meta to pay $25bn in fines for Facebook privacy violations

A jury found Meta guilty of lying to Facebook users in ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠New Mexico about access to their data.

A United States judge has ordered Meta to pay $25bn after a jury found the company misled Facebook users about privacy violations, marking the biggest fine ever against the tech giant.

New Mexico state District Judge Francis Mathew issued the ruling on Wednesday.

“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said.

Last month, a jury found Meta responsible for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez highlighted that the decision was one of the largest state verdicts against a company in US history.

“This judgement should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” Torrez said at a news conference.

Meta lawyer Matt Nicholson argued in court that a sum as high as $40bn would be “shocking to the conscience”, while a lawyer for New Mexico, Randi McGinn, urged standing up to “tech titans who think they are bulletproof and can do whatever they want”.

“The jury didn’t make findings that any New Mexican heard or saw these statements, or was harmed by them,” Nicholson argued during a hearing held early this month.

Torrez told reporters following the verdict that all the money awarded would go into a fund for the state’s education system.

The amount awarded in the case far exceeds the $5bn fine that the Federal Trade Commission levied against Facebook in 2019.

New Mexico accused Meta of misleading users about who could access their personal information and how harmful content was handled on its platforms. Jurors found that 26 of 29 statements made by Meta and its leadership on privacy and content moderation were misleading.

Meta plans to appeal the verdict, potentially reducing the final payment amount.

In a statement, CJ Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said the company is confident it will 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. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”

The lawsuit, filed in 2021, stemmed partly from revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that is now defunct, had obtained personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent and used it to develop targeted political advertisements. Its clients included President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

The case, a major setback for the tech giant, marks the second legal defeat for Meta in New Mexico in six months. In March, a jury found the company misled users about the safety of young people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, ordering it to pay $375m in civil penalties. Meta was later ordered to make an additional $567m payment into a state fund for teen mental health and was required to implement measures to protect young users.