A New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion After a Jury Found It Misled Users on Data Privacy
Jurors found 26 of 29 statements misleading and counted more than 43 million violations of state consumer law. Meta says it will appeal and calls the ruling a 'tax on speech.'
A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion. The company says it will appeal.
The ruling. Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty Wednesday, after jurors found last month that Meta made dozens of misleading statements to Facebook users about its handling of personal data and other practices. "Facebook's wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," he wrote.
The case. New Mexico sued in 2021, accusing Meta of misleading users about who could see their personal information and how it handled harmful content. The case stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the now-defunct firm, which worked for Trump's 2016 campaign, obtained information on as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without consent. Jurors found 26 of 29 statements examined at trial were misleading and counted more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws.
The number. Mathew said the violations could have brought a penalty above $219 billion under state law, and he reduced it to $25 billion. Meta had asked him to cap it at $3.45 billion.
Each side. Attorney General Raúl Torrez called it one of the largest rulings ever against Meta by a single state and said it is "a very clear warning" to Big Tech. Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the approach makes it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico" and that the suit "seeks to impose a tax on speech." The company says it is confident it will prevail on appeal.
Outside view. Monte Mann, a business litigation partner at Armstrong Teasdale, called $25 billion "staggering" but said he would not assume Meta ends up paying anything close to that. He expects a serious fight on appeal over whether the penalty is legally sustainable.
What the report does not say. It does not say when an appeal will be filed or whether the penalty is paused while it is pending.