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According to AnewZ, a judge in the US state of New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion. The case is linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and jurors found that the company misled consumers.
Judge Francis Mathew said on Wednesday that the fine could have exceeded $219 billion under state law, but he reduced the amount to $25 billion.
“The violations Facebook committed over the years and systematically communicated to the public go to the heart of the company’s basic business practices,” Mathew wrote in his ruling.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torres called it the largest, or perhaps the largest, single state-level judgment against a company in US history. Speaking at a news conference in Albuquerque, Torres said it was “long overdue for big tech companies to be held accountable.”
Meta said it was confident it would prevail on appeal. The company’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the ruling and the attorney general’s approach make it nearly impossible to do business in New Mexico.
Meta argued that a multibillion-dollar fine risked violating its constitutional rights and asked that the amount be capped at $3.45 billion. The state sought a fine of $35 billion to $40 billion.
Jury counts more than 43 million violations
New Mexico filed a lawsuit against Meta in 2021, following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had collected the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. The now-defunct political consulting firm worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and used the data to profile and target voters.
The state accused Meta of misleading users about who had access to their data, how it dealt with hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies.
On September 25, jurors concluded that 26 of 29 statements made by the company and its leadership were misleading. They counted more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. State law allows fines of up to $5,000 per violation; the money will go to the state’s school system.
This is the largest fine Meta has faced in connection with the Cambridge Analytica case. In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion over the same scandal.
Second ruling against company in New Mexico
This is the second ruling against Meta in New Mexico in the past six months. In March, a jury in Santa Fe found that the company had misled users about the safety of young people on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties.
Analysts said the fine would not significantly affect the company’s valuation. Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson & Co., said Meta is valued at about $2 trillion and could continue appealing the cases, extending the proceedings.
