Meta Ordered To Pay New Mexico $25 Billion Over Misleading Privacy Claims

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

A Santa Fe judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company committed 43.9 million violations of state consumer-protection law by making misleading statements about Facebook users’ data privacy and control.

The case, filed in 2021, grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. New Mexico alleged that Facebook, now Meta, systematically misled the public – and New Mexico users – about how it handled personal data and allowed third-party apps access to users’ information, including statements by senior executives such as CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

A jury on Sept. 25 sided with the state, finding 26 of 29 public statements by Facebook to be misleading and treating each as reaching large numbers of New Mexico Facebook users, producing a total of almost 43.9 million violations.

Under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, the maximum penalty is $5,000 per willful violation. Judge Francis J. Mathew of New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court imposed the statutory maximum (roughly $219.5 billion) but reduced the award to $25 billion. Interest accrues at 15 percent annually until paid. Meta has said it will appeal.

“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.

The jury’s findings covered Facebook’s statements on data practices, as well as its handling of hate speech, misinformation, and exceptions to platform rules.

“This is a historic day for New Mexico and for consumers across the country,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement. “A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million violations of our consumer protection statute, and this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences.”

Meta did not immediately return a request for comment by The Epoch Times, but its chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, told Reuters the company is confident it will prevail 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. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” Mahoney said.

In the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the now-defunct British political consulting firm obtained personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users and used the data for political profiling and targeted advertising. New Mexico alleged that Facebook misled users about third-party access to their data and the degree of control users actually had, and that after the Cambridge Analytica event the company’s statements about investigations, audits, bans, and user notifications were also misleading.

This is Meta’s second major courtroom loss in New Mexico this year.

In a separate case involving the safety of young users, a jury in March imposed $375 million in civil penalties on the company. On Aug. 6, a judge ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million into a fund for youth mental-health remedies and imposed court-supervised changes to Facebook and Instagram, bringing the total financial exposure in that case to $942 million.