Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. $25 billion is a huge fine, the biggest fine Meta has ever faced, but we, the folks at WIRED, were still wondering: Would Meta even feel the pain?
A brief recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state’s unfair practices law by lying to Meta users about how it processed their data. (Later, New Mexico’s attorney general also filed complaints against Meta’s content moderation policies.) In September, a jury found in favor of the state. Then came the multibillion-dollar penalty.
“This decision, and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement, makes it virtually impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” CJ Mahoney, Meta’s legal director, said in a statement. “Essentially, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules on what people can say online. We are confident that we will prevail on appeal.”
Meta’s legal problems have multiplied so much this year that it’s hard to keep track of them. Earlier this year in New Mexico, a jury ruled that the social media company must pay $375 million for violating the state’s unfair practices law. This trial was related to child safety. A second phase of the case resulted in Meta being ordered to pay $567 million.
Meanwhile, a Los Angeles County superior court found Meta — and Google-owned YouTube — liable for harming a user’s mental health with their apps’ addictive design features. The plaintiff, a young woman, received $6 million; Meta must pay most of this payment. Then, in August, Meta settled a landmark federal case brought against the company by the majority of U.S. states. This lawsuit, once again, focused on the addictive features of its apps that were alleged to be harmful to children. As part of that settlement, Meta will pay states between $17 billion and $18 billion over 10 years.
In total, that’s several billion. And yet: this still only represents the cost of doing business for Meta. Reuters reports that in New Mexico’s most recent trial, the state’s lawyers initially asked Judge Francis Mathew to award the state between $35 billion and $45 billion. That would have been important for the state, but would that extra $20 billion have brought Meta to its knees? No.
Even if Meta had been forced to pay the total maximum fine under the New Mexico ruling — a whopping $219 billion, or $5,000 for 43 million violations, reduced by the judge to $25 billion — the company would have felt only slight pain. At the time of writing, Meta is worth around $1.7 trillion. Its stock took a hit on Thursday, but that was due to a confluence of factors, like Meta’s earnings report on Wednesday, the company’s massive capital spending in AI and the overall slowdown in AI stocks.
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