A New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay 25 billion dollars after a jury found Facebook misled users about their privacy

The number the judge wrote first was larger than the number Meta has to pay, and the first number explains the second. Judge Francis Mathew of the New Mexico state court found that a penalty of more than 219 billion dollars was warranted under the state's consumer protection law. He reduced it to 25 billion dollars in his order on Wednesday. Even reduced, Attorney General Raul Torrez said, it is one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on a corporation in American history.

The case reaches back to Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third party app. New Mexico sued Meta in 2021. The state accused the company of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data, about how it handles hate speech and misinformation on the platform, and about other internal policies. The company knew third parties had broad access to users' personal data, the state said, and tolerated harmful content when it benefited the bottom line.

Jurors agreed with most of it. On September 25 they found that 26 of 29 statements the company and its leadership had made on those issues were misleading, and they counted more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection laws, based on the number of New Mexico residents who were the audience for each misleading statement. "Facebook's wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Mathew wrote.

Meta says it will fight the ruling and expects to win. "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," said C. J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." The company previously paid a 5 billion dollar penalty to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over Cambridge Analytica. Six other states settled their Cambridge Analytica claims against Meta for 459.2 million dollars, as part of a 17.1 billion dollar multistate settlement the company reached in August to resolve state claims that its platforms harmed teen mental health. New Mexico held out, took its case to a jury, and now holds the largest single judgment of the group, subject to appeal, as of October 22.

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