A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about their privacy. State Prosecutor Raul Torres said that the verdict is a signal to the entire Silicon Valley.
Judge Francis Mathew of Santa Fe imposed the sentence after a jury in September found Meta responsible for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws. That came when political consultancy Cambridge Analytica collected Facebook user data to create targeted political ads for the 2016 election. "Facebook promised users control over their data that was untrue," the judge wrote.
The state sought between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing that the company would only change its behavior if faced with a sum that affected the value of its shares. Attorneys for Meta sought up to $3,4 billion and argued that a higher penalty would be unconstitutional and would not hold up on appeal. Torrez called the ruling a message to Silicon Valley and said the state "may have just secured funding to build schools for the next 100 years."
The company said it would appeal. Her chief legal advisor C. DŽ. Mahoney estimated that the verdict and the way the prosecutor conducts proceedings make doing business in that country "almost impossible".
New Mexico sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had downloaded data on up to 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. According to the media, the case concerns about 350.000 residents of that country. The maximum fine for the misdemeanors found by the jury, according to prosecutors, would be more than $219 billion.
"Meta" claims that the evidence shows that it does not sell user data and that New Mexico has not proven that anyone was actually misled. In the second phase of the trial, the judge ordered the company to pay $567 million to the state fund for the mental health of teenagers and to introduce measures to protect teenagers on Facebook and Instagram.
In August, Target reached a settlement with nearly every state and territory except New Mexico and Florida in the teen's social media addiction case, agreeing to pay $18 billion and introduce stricter child protection measures. New Mexico is not part of that settlement because it is conducting its own proceedings.
The ruling shows that US states can extract tens of billions of dollars from companies and that fines for defrauding consumers can exceed the amounts previously imposed by the federal government.
For users around the world, it's a signal that platforms are being held accountable for their privacy promises.
For Serbia, where Facebook is one of the most used networks, and Instagram is an important channel of communication for independent media, it is also a reminder of the responsibility of the company to which these media report bot attacks.
The final outcome depends on the appeal, as "Meta" claims that the sentence is unconstitutional.
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