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Meta Ordered To Pay New Mexico $25 Billion After Jury Finds Deceptive Facebook Privacy Violations
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Meta ordered to pay New Mexico $25 billion over Cambridge Analytica privacy deception. Jury found over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws.
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Record penalty in Santa Fe
Meta was ordered to pay New Mexico a $25 billion civil penalty in the Cambridge Analytica Facebook case after a jury found the company liable for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws.
Judge Francis Mathew issued the order in Santa Fe, and the ruling came after jurors found Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act based on widely viewed deceptive statements about how it handled hate speech and user data.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the judgment “one of the single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history,” and he said the payment would be put toward public education in the state.
Judge Francis Mathew wrote that “Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” and the ruling said the deception was intentional and executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked.
Meta said the ruling and Torrez’s office’s approach to enforcement “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” and Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said it was “confident we will prevail on appeal.”
What the jury found
Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws tied to Cambridge Analytica harvesting Facebook data to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election season. The case focused on accusations that Facebook deceived users about a breach stemming from a third-party personality quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles and sold it to Cambridge Analytica. Judge Francis Mathew said the penalty was supported by “the extraordinary number of deliberate violations found by the jury,” and he cited the involvement of high-ranking Facebook executives and the “clear intentional and systematic nature” of the repeated false statements.
New Mexico sought fines of $35 billion to $40 billion, and Meta’s lawyers argued for paying no more than $3.4 billion, with Meta saying an award many times larger would be unconstitutional. Meta also argued that the state failed to prove misleading statements and that content moderation actually harmed people in New Mexico, while New Mexico prosecutors argued the company’s statements deceived the entire population of New Mexico and extended beyond social media users.
Appeals, education, and AI
The ruling set interest to accrue on the penalty at an annual rate of 15% until Meta fully paid the fine, and the judge justified the sanction under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. New Mexico officials said the fines would go toward education spending, and Torrez said the state intended “to do everything in our power to make sure that those resources are eventually delivered” to New Mexico. Meta said it planned to appeal, and the company argued that interest would accrue during an appeal while the number of violations could be reduced.
The Cambridge Analytica penalty also arrived as Meta continued to invest in artificial intelligence, with the company launching its Muse AI personal assistant app in September and reporting that its AI investments were boosting its core advertising business. Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, said $25 billion is “a drop in the bucket for Meta,” and she added that “Right now, they are rolling out Muse, an AI assistant encouraging people to trust it with everything from their bank accounts to their medical information.”