A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion on Wednesday after a jury found that the Facebook owner misled residents about its privacy protections and content moderation practices. The penalty stems from a state consumer protection case tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal and ranks among the largest imposed on a technology company.
State District Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty after a Santa Fe jury found in September that Meta had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. Meta said it would appeal, setting up a further legal fight over both the findings and the size of the award.
The law permits civil penalties of up to $5,000 for each violation. Mathew’s order calculated an award of $219.5 billion before reducing the amount to $25 billion. The judge also ordered interest to accrue at 15% annually until the penalty is paid in full.
In explaining the decision, Mathew cited the repeated and intentional nature of the misconduct, its duration, the involvement of senior Facebook executives and the number of New Mexico residents reached by the company’s statements. The findings concerned representations about how Facebook collected and protected personal information, as well as how it handled harmful material on its services.
The case grew out of revelations in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica had improperly obtained information associated with roughly 87 million Facebook users. The political consulting firm, whose clients included Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, used personal data to support targeted political advertising. The controversy brought scrutiny to Facebook’s oversight of third-party developers and their access to user information.
New Mexico’s lawsuit also challenged the company’s response after the scandal became public. Mathew found that Facebook had not completed the comprehensive investigation it promised. His order identified pressure to contain costs, insufficient enforcement resources, inadequate investigative methods and concern about establishing precedents for future investigations as factors that undermined the inquiry.
Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas filed the lawsuit in 2021. His successor, Raúl Torrez, oversaw the trial and welcomed Wednesday’s order, saying the state had pursued the case to secure accountability and protection for residents’ personal information.
Meta disputed the ruling and the state’s legal approach. Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the company expected to prevail on appeal and argued that the lawsuit sought to penalize speech by imposing new standards for online expression. During proceedings over the penalty, Meta’s lawyers argued that an excessively large award would violate constitutional due process protections.
The two sides had proposed sharply different amounts. New Mexico’s lawyers sought between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that the penalty needed to be large enough to change the company’s behavior. Meta argued for no more than $3.4 billion and maintained that the state had not established that New Mexicans were harmed by the statements at issue.
New Mexico pursued its case separately from a broader multistate settlement involving Meta. The company previously agreed in 2022 to pay $725 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit arising from the Cambridge Analytica controversy. Under New Mexico’s constitution, fines for consumer protection violations support state education spending, although the anticipated appeal leaves the timing of any payment unresolved.
Sources: POLITICO – Tech (US), CNBC, Yahoo, NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth