A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company misled Facebook users about how it protected their personal data in the years around the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Story Highlights
- On Wednesday, October 21, Judge Francis J. Mathew ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion in civil penalties.
- In September, a Santa Fe jury found Meta broke the state’s consumer protection law more than 43 million times.
- Jurors found that 26 of 29 statements by Meta and its leaders about user privacy were misleading.
- Meta says it disagrees with the verdict and will appeal.
- To count the violations, jurors gave each misleading statement in major news outlets 2.1 million violations, one for every New Mexican.
What The Jury Decided And Why
The case was about what Meta told the public. New Mexico argued that the company made false and misleading promises about privacy under the state’s Unfair Practices Act, a consumer protection law that bans deceiving people in business. Jurors agreed. They found that the company’s misleading statements reached all of the state’s more than 2.1 million residents.
Meta disputes the verdict. Its lawyers argued at trial that the statements the state presented were “cherry-picked snippets” and that New Mexico never proved any consumer was actually misled or harmed. “We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone,” the company has said.
In his ruling, Mathew wrote that Facebook’s deception was intentional and that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked. “The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate and goes to the heart of Facebook’s basic business proposition,” he wrote.
The Cambridge Analytica Story Behind The Case
Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. It obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. The data came from a personality quiz app called “thisisyourdigitallife.” About 270,000 people installed the app, but it also gathered data on their Facebook friends, reaching roughly 87 million users around the world.
According to reports, Facebook learned in December 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had the data. The public did not find out until 2018, when a whistleblower came forward. The statements jurors found misleading included promises to let users control how advertisers reached their data and a broken pledge to stop outside apps from getting at friends’ data. The state said Meta spread these statements through its newsroom, earnings calls and media interviews.
How The Court Reached $25 Billion
New Mexico law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation. To count the violations, jurors gave each misleading statement that ran in major news outlets 2.1 million violations, one for every New Mexican. Statements made through Meta’s own channels got 1.4 million each, the estimated number of New Mexicans with Facebook accounts in 2020. That came to 43,899,720 violations.
At the top rate, those violations would have added up to about $219.5 billion. The judge cut the total to $25 billion. Before the ruling, the state had asked for up to $40 billion. Meta’s lawyers argued for no more than $3.4 billion and said anything far higher would be unconstitutional.
Meta’s Response And The Coming Appeal
C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said the ruling “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” He added, “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.” Meta also accuses the state of mixing up privacy issues with free speech issues. The company says it is confident it “will prevail on appeal.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, whose office brought the case, called the ruling “a historic day for New Mexico and for consumers across the country.” He said the order shows the violations “carry real consequences” and that big tech companies have acted as if they are “beyond the reach of the law.”
Why This Matters For Families
This is not the first loss for Meta in New Mexico. In a separate case over harm to children, a Santa Fe jury in March ordered Meta to pay $375 million. In August, a judge ordered the company to pay another $567 million for youth mental health programs.
Families share photos, church news and their kids’ milestones online. They expect a straight answer about who can see that information. The jury found Meta’s words did not match its actions, and the judge set a penalty big enough to get Big Tech’s attention. An appeals court will have the next word on whether the verdict and the $25 billion stand.
Sources:
insiderpaper.com, cnbc.com, apnews.com, courthousenews.com, axios.com, nbcnews.com, reuters.com