A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion after finding that the company deliberately misled Facebook users about how their personal data was handled. The ruling was issued on 21 October local time, more than three weeks after a jury verdict against the company.
Judge Francis J. Mathew said a penalty of more than $219 billion could be justified under state law but cut it to $25 billion. The state had asked for $35–40 billion, while Meta argued it should pay no more than $3.4 billion, according to ABC News.
The case
New Mexico sued in 2021 over the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which a third-party quiz app harvested data from about 87 million Facebook profiles that was later used for political advertising in the 2016 US election. The state argued that Meta lied about who could access users’ data.
In September a jury found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection law, all linked to misleading public statements about data handling. Jurors rejected a separate claim that Facebook made false statements about removing harmful content.
A single US state has now imposed a penalty five times the size of the federal fine for the same scandal.
Meta’s response
Chief legal officer CJ Mahoney said Meta was confident of winning on appeal and argued that the attorney general’s approach makes it all but impossible to do business in New Mexico. Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the result as possibly the largest single state verdict against a company in US history.
A wider legal bill
The figure is far above the $5 billion the Federal Trade Commission imposed on Facebook in 2019. In August Meta settled related claims with almost all other states; ABC News puts that settlement at $18 billion, while Al Jazeera reports $17 billion. New Mexico had also won $942 million from Meta in two earlier trials this year over child safety claims.
What to watch
- Meta’s appeal, during which interest accrues on the penalty.
- Whether other states pursuing Meta cite the New Mexico ruling.
- The outcome of the multistate youth-safety trial that began in a California federal court in August.
