Meta to pay $25B in New Mexico case over misleading Facebook users

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay a $25B civil penalty for misleading Facebook users about privacy and hate speech, Bloomberg reported. A jury found more than 43 million violations of state law in September. The state wanted up to $40B, and Meta plans to appeal.

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay a $25B civil penalty for misleading Facebook users about their privacy and its hate speech rules, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. It is among the largest verdicts in US legal history.

In September, a jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection law. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm got data on up to 87 million Facebook users. The state also argued that some high-profile accounts got lighter scrutiny than ordinary users under Meta’s hate speech rules.

Judge Francis Mathew applied the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation, which would have added up to $219B. He then cut it to $25B. The state had asked for $35B to $40B, while Meta’s lawyers argued for no more than $3.4B, the Associated Press reported.

“Facebook’s wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Mathew wrote.

Meta plans to appeal, according to the AP. Its lawyers had said a penalty in the tens of billions would be a “constitutional violation of epic proportions.” They also argued the jury never found that anyone in New Mexico saw the statements or was harmed.

Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who filed the case in 2021, called the penalty “one of the single largest, if not the largest, single-state verdict against a company in American history.” He has said the money will go to a state education fund.

The sum is bigger than the $14.8B in general-fund revenue New Mexico expects in fiscal 2028. It also tops the roughly $18B Meta agreed in August to pay most US states over harm to young users.

New Mexico stayed out of those group deals and went to court alone, even after Meta warned it could leave the state over its child safety demands. It has already won $375M from Meta in a child safety trial in March, plus a court order to pay $567M into a teen health fund.

Meta has paid before over Cambridge Analytica. It paid the Federal Trade Commission a $5B fine in 2019 and $725M to end a class action in 2022.