A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about how their personal data was handled, the largest penalty ever imposed on the company, according to The Associated Press. State District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that the deception was intentional and that executives repeatedly misled users, adding that Facebook told people they controlled their data and “this was false.”
The penalty follows a September jury verdict that found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection law, with jurors finding between 1.3 million and 2.1 million violations for each misleading statement, Bloomberg Government reported. The law allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez brought the case over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm harvested Facebook data to target voters during the 2016 election, and he called the judgment “an unambiguous message” to Silicon Valley.
Meta said it is confident it will win on appeal. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the lawsuit amounts to “a tax on speech” and that the state’s approach makes it “all but impossible” to do business there. The ruling lands the same day Meta reports quarterly earnings, and it is the second major New Mexico loss for the company this year after a jury in March ordered it to pay $375 million for misleading users about child safety, a verdict SSC examined in how courts are treating platform design as the problem. For a company valued near $1.8 trillion, $25 billion is survivable, but the legal theory behind it may be harder to contain.