NEW MEXICO — A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company spent years misleading the public about how it handled Facebook users’ data, the largest penalty ever imposed on the company, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Judge Francis Mathew wrote, according to Al Jazeera. He found the violations were “willful” and spanned 2010 to 2021, and that communications among senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.”
The judge said a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law but reduced it to $25 billion — roughly Meta’s quarterly profit, the BBC said. The state had sought up to $40 billion; Meta argued anything above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional. A jury found Meta violated state law more than 40 million times.
The lawsuit, filed in 2021, grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a British political consultancy harvested data from as many as 87 million Facebook users. The state also accused Meta of misleading the public about its handling of hate speech.
“No corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said. 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 expects to win on appeal.
Earlier this year New Mexico won $942 million from Meta in two trials over child safety on Instagram and Facebook.
Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera
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