New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $25bn over misleading users about their data
A New Mexico judge has fined tech company Meta $25bn for spending years misleading the public about how Facebook user data was handled. Meta says it will appeal.
A judge in the US state of New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25bn (£18.6bn). It is the largest penalty ever imposed on the company. The ruling followed a two-week trial earlier this year, which found that Meta had for years misled the public about how it handled Facebook users' data.
What the court found
Judge Francis Mathew said the deception reached the heart of Facebook's core business practices. In his view, the violations were wilful and lasted more than 11 years, from 2010 to 2021. He wrote that communications among senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were designed to mislead the public.
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That political consulting firm used data from millions of Facebook users, including in work linked to the 2016 US presidential election. State lawyers argued that company executives repeatedly said user data was never shared with third parties without permission, when in fact it was. They said all of the state's roughly 2 million residents were affected. A jury found Meta had broken state law more than 40 million times.
The full penalty, calculated from thousands of violations, came to $219bn, but the judge reduced it to $25bn. The state had sought up to $40bn, while Meta argued that anything above $3.4bn would be unconstitutional.
Reactions
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable. Meta's chief lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it all but impossible to do business in the state, and that the company would appeal and expected to succeed.
Earlier penalties
In 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5bn over its data privacy practices. This year New Mexico also fined Meta almost $1bn for misleading the public about the safety of its platforms for children. Separately, Meta reached a settlement with California and several other states over child safety, which included no fine and no admission of wrongdoing.
