A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company misled users about its privacy practices in a case arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal — one of the largest legal penalties ever imposed on a technology company.
State District Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty on Wednesday, following a September jury verdict that found Meta had violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. The judge found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law, which allows up to $5,000 per violation, but reduced the figure to $25 billion. State lawyers had sought $35 billion to $40 billion; Meta had argued for a maximum of $3.4 billion.
"Facebook's misrepresentations about users' control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model," Mathew wrote, describing what he called a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.
New Mexico's attorney general sued Meta in 2021, after revelations that Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, had improperly harvested the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app to build profiles of American voters. The state accused Meta of lying to users about who could access their data, and of tolerating hate speech and harmful content when it benefited the company's bottom line. Under New Mexico's constitution, the civil penalties will go into a state fund dedicated to public education, and the state is also seeking an injunction against Meta's past data practices.
Meta said it will 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," said chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney, calling the lawsuit "a tax on speech" and saying the company is confident it will prevail on appeal.
The judgment is the latest in a long line of legal costs from the scandal: Meta previously paid a $5 billion penalty to the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019, and six other states have settled their own related lawsuits. For now, the $25 billion figure stands as a warning shot at Silicon Valley — though the appeal means the final bill is likely years away.
Also read: the ConnectWise breach by Chinese-linked hackers | Instacart's $5 million settlement over discrimination against American workers