A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion (£18.6 billion) fine on Wednesday for misleading Facebook users about data privacy. The penalty marks the largest fine against the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Judge Francis Mathew issued the October 21 ruling after a two-week trial. Jurors found that Meta repeatedly deceived the public about personal information and its business practices.
“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” the judge said, adding they reached “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices”.
Meta’s chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said the decision made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico”. The company plans to appeal, and Mahoney said it would succeed.
The lawsuit, filed in 2021, grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The political consultancy obtained information from millions of Facebook users for political work, including Donald Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign.
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Reuters reported that the scandal involved data from as many as 87 million users, collected through a third-party application without consent.
State lawyers challenged executives’ repeated assurances that third parties could not access or receive users’ information without permission. They argued that Facebook’s actual practices contradicted those statements.
New Mexico also accused Meta of misleading people about its financial benefits from hate speech and its enforcement of content rules. Jurors upheld those allegations.
Lawyers argued that the deception affected roughly two million people, effectively the state’s entire population. New Mexico’s Department of Justice said jurors identified precisely 43,899,725 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.
Mathew described the violations as “willful” and said they spanned “more than 11 years”, from 2010 to 2021. Communications involving senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public”, he wrote.
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Meta disputed the accusations and challenged the lawsuit’s implications for online expression.
“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” Mahoney said.
State lawyers sought up to $40 billion. Meta argued that penalties exceeding roughly $3.4 billion would violate constitutional protections.
The judge calculated a potential penalty of approximately $219 billion before reducing it to $25 billion, roughly equivalent to Meta’s quarterly profits.
“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said.
“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”
The ruling adds to Meta’s legal penalties and settlements this year. The BBC report cited an $18 billion child-safety deal involving California.
It also follows the US Federal Trade Commission’s $5 billion privacy penalty against Facebook in 2019. That settlement required stronger privacy oversight alongside the financial penalty.
