A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion on Wednesday after a jury found the company had misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent, Reuters 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 in his order following the verdict. Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law, based on the jury’s violation count and the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion, with interest accruing at 15 percent a year until it is paid in full, CNBC reported. Mathew also wrote that Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation it promised after the Cambridge Analytica revelations, describing the internal examination as willfully ineffective. A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters said.
Jurors on September 25 found that 26 of 29 statements made by the company and its leadership were misleading, covering who had access to user data and how the company handled hate speech and misinformation. They put the total at more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection law, counted by the number of Facebook users or New Mexico residents in the audience for each misleading statement. At an October 1 hearing, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, asked Mathew to award between $35 billion and $40 billion. In court filings Meta urged the judge to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion, arguing that a higher penalty risked scaring businesses out of the state and that the evidence showed Meta does not sell user data and the state had not proved any consumer was actually misled.
Attorney General Raul Torrez 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. State law directs that all of the penalty money go to New Mexico’s school system, Torrez told reporters after the verdict, according to Reuters.
The order is the second Santa Fe jury result against Meta in six months in a suit brought by the state. In March a jury found Meta misled users about young users’ safety on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and ordered $375 million in civil penalties, and a judge later directed the company to pay $567 million into a state fund for teen mental health and to implement measures to protect teen users in New Mexico.