Meta was ordered by a New Mexico judge to pay $25 billion to the state after a jury found the social media company deceived consumers for years on its data privacy policies.
Judge Francis Mathew awarded the amount, which New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described as “one of the largest, if not the largest, state verdicts against a corporation in American history.”
“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message for Silicon Valley,” Torrez said at a press conference.
In September, jury members found that Facebook made false or misleading statements when it told consumers it controlled how their information was shared. The social media giant also misled consumers by claiming it did not sell or share personal information with advertisers, the jury concluded.
The jury found that the company’s “top executives,” including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, made false statements about the service’s data privacy policies, the judge ruled.
“These communications were part of a consistent strategy intended to mislead the public,” Mathew wrote.
The case stems from allegations that Facebook misled users about a data breach stemming from a third-party personality quiz that collected data from about 87 million profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm. Cambridge Analyticato generate targeted advertisements.
In a statement released Wednesday, Torrez said the case “has always been about more than one company or scandal.”
He added: “It’s about whether companies can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing significant consequences. »
CJ Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement that the company is confident it “will prevail on appeal.”
“This decision, and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement, makes it virtually impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said. “At its core, this lawsuit is about imposing a tax on speech in order to enforce new rules on what people can say online.”
Where could the $25 billion go?
Under the New Mexico Constitution, fines for violating consumer protection laws are channeled into public education spending.
“We may have funded school construction for the next 100 years,” Torrez said, while emphasizing that the money would be blocked if Meta appeals the decision, as planned.
Forty-eight other states have settled a nationwide case with Facebook, but New Mexico chose to sue the social media company alone.
New Mexico lawyers were seeking between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that the company would only change its ways with a sum large enough to affect its stock price.
Meta’s lawyers said the company should pay no more than $3.4 billion, arguing that a much larger sum would violate due process, be unconstitutional and not hold up on appeal.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook, then called Meta, with a fine of 5 billion dollars about its role in allowing Cambridge Analytica to collect user data without their consent.
Meta argued that New Mexico failed to prove that the tech giant’s executives made misleading statements about privacy and that its content moderation practices harmed state residents.
Shares of Meta were up $13.56, or 2%, at $707.81 Wednesday afternoon.
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