A New Mexico judge has ruled that Meta owes $25 billion in penlties after being found liable of allowing a third party to harvest user data and misleading users about how their data was taken and what it was being used for.
The judgement follows the Cambridge Analytica case from the 2010s, in which a firm gathered Facebook user data by having users log in to an app called “This Is Your Digital Life” which asked questions and built profiles of the users. The data was then used for political campaigns, without users’ consent, including Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The case in New Mexico alleged that Meta knew about third parties collecting the data and lied to Facebook users about it. The state also said that the company allowed hate speech and misinformation to spread on the social media site when it benefited the company, regardless of how it impacted users.
The extraordinary number of willful violations found
“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act,” Judge Francis Mathew wrote in a court filing after the verdict.
According to a report from Reuter’s, jurors found that Facebook “had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, based on the number of Facebook users or New Mexico residents who were the audience for each misleading statement.”
Judge Mathew found that the violations warranted a $219 billion penalty, but brought that number down to $25 billion. Meta asked that it be capped at $3.45 billion.
Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J
Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney released a statement following the judgement, saying that the company will appeal.
“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,” Mahoney said. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”
Earlier this year, Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in a separate civil case, after a New Mexico court found that the company violated state consumer protection law by misleading users about the safety of its platforms for children.
