A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on Wednesday to pay $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about their privacy.
It’s the largest penalty ever imposed on the company and five times the $5 billion the Federal Trade Commission levied in 2019 over the same Cambridge Analytica scandal.
“Facebook promised users that they controlled their data,” State District Judge Francis Mathew wrote. “This was false.”
On Sept. 25, jurors found that 26 of 29 public statements by Meta and its leadership were misleading. They then counted one violation for every New Mexico user who saw one of those statements, which added up to more than 43 million violations in a state of about 2.1 million people. State law allows up to $5,000 per violation, so the penalty could have topped $200 billion before Mathew cut it to $25 billion. That still works out to roughly $12,000 per resident, according to Villanova University’s Peter Ormerod.
One exhibit at trial was a 2010 Washington Post op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg that promised “you have control over how your information is shared” and added that Facebook would “never” sell anyone’s information. A third-party personality quiz later scraped data from as many as 87 million Facebook profiles, and that data ended up with Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. New Mexico sued in 2021. Meta argued at trial that it doesn’t sell user data and that the state never proved a single consumer was actually misled, and it asked the judge to cap the penalty at $3.45 billion so businesses wouldn’t flee the state.
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and called the case an attempt “to impose a tax on speech.” Meta will appeal. Interest accrues while it does, and payment could be years away.
D.A. Davidson analyst Gil Luria doesn’t expect the penalty to dent a company worth nearly $2 trillion, which he said “will likely continue to appeal these cases and drag them out.”
ADVERTISEMENT
The verdict is New Mexico’s second major win against Meta this year. In March, a Santa Fe jury found the company misled users about child safety on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and ordered $375 million in penalties. A judge later added $567 million for a teen mental health fund. Vincent Joralemon of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology sees a pattern forming. “The takeaway from this will be that consumer protection laws will be the way to hold tech companies accountable,” he said.
Under state law, every dollar of the $25 billion goes to New Mexico’s schools. Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the judgment “an unambiguous message to Silicon Valley.”
