A judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for deceiving users about privacy on Facebook, marking the biggest fine ever against the tech giant.
Facebook’s deception was intentional and executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked, state District Court Judge Francis J Mathew wrote in his ruling, according to AP.
“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said.
Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws for making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data.
The case was brought after political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election season.
The award will serve as a warning to tech companies that New Mexico will hold them accountable, state Attorney General Raul Torrez said at a news conference.
“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” he said.
Meta said the ruling and Torrez’s office’s approach to 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 prevail on appeal,” CJ Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer, said in a statement.
The Menlo Park, California, company has a market value of $1.8 trillion and brought in more than $200 billion in revenue last year. Company shares traded 2% higher after Wednesday’s announcement, and it was scheduled to report its quarterly earnings later in the day.
In August, Meta reached a settlement with 48 states and territories — except New Mexico and Florida — to pay $18 billion and add stronger child-safety measures to its Facebook and Instagram platforms.
The settlement ended a trial over teen social media addiction and resolved a pivotal case years in the making that sought to hold the tech giant accountable for the role its platforms played in undermining children’s mental health. The effort targeted features designed to grab young people’s attention.
New Mexico did not join the multistate settlement, choosing to go after the company on its own.
The director of a nonprofit that supports stronger policies toward corporations said $25 billion is “a drop in the bucket for Meta,” but demonstrates 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,” added Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. “Which is why we need more enforcers with courage and laws with actual teeth to rein them in.”
At the trial, attorneys for the state cited a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company didn’t sell user data.
