A judge in the U.S. state of New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company misled consumers, in a case linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Judge Francis Mathew said on Wednesday that state law warranted a penalty of more than $219 billion, but he reduced it to $25 billion.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Mathew wrote in his order.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdicts against a company in American history.
“It has been a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable,” Torrez told a press conference in Albuquerque.
Meta said it was confident it would win on 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 C.J. Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer.
Meta had argued that a penalty in the billions of dollars risked violating its constitutional rights. It asked the judge to cap the penalty at $3.45 billion, while the state had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion.
New Mexico sued Meta in 2021, after revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 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 for voter profiling and targeting.
The state accused Meta of lying to users about who had access to their data, how it handled hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies.
On 25 September, jurors found 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 a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation, and the money will go to New Mexico’s school system.
It is the largest penalty Meta has faced over Cambridge Analytica. In 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion over the same scandal.
It is the second verdict against Meta in New Mexico in six months. In March, a jury in Santa Fe found the company had misled users about young people’s safety on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties.
Analysts said the penalty was unlikely to dent the company’s value. “Meta is worth nearly two trillion dollars, and will likely continue to appeal these cases and drag them out,” said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson & Co.
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