Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion to New Mexico Over Facebook Privacy Deception in Cambridge Analytica Case

SANTA FE, N.M., Oct. 21 (TodayViralUSA) — A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found the company had misled Facebook users for years about how their personal data was shared, the largest penalty the social media giant has faced over its privacy practices.

State District Judge Francis Mathew issued the order after a jury found that Facebook violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act 43,899,725 times. The judge wrote that the company’s wrongdoing “goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” according to Reuters.

A penalty cut from $219 billion

Mathew calculated that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law, but reduced the figure to $25 billion. The state had sought as much as $40 billion, while Meta argued that anything above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional, the BBC reported.

The judge found the violations were “willful” and stretched over more than 11 years, from 2010 to 2021, and that communications among senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.”

Roots in Cambridge Analytica

Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued in 2021 over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the now-defunct political consulting firm, which worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, obtained data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without their consent.

The state’s case went further, accusing the company of misrepresenting who could access user data and how it handled hate speech and misinformation. New Mexico pursued the case on its own rather than joining a multistate settlement.

“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” Torrez said. “Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”

Meta vows appeal

Meta’s chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and that the company would appeal. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” he said.

The penalty dwarfs the $5 billion fine the Federal Trade Commission imposed on the company in 2019 over the same scandal. Earlier this year, New Mexico also won a penalty of almost $1 billion against Meta in a separate case over child safety on its platforms.