META fined $25 billion for privacy violation

A New Mexico state judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms Inc. to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found the company liable for tens of millions of consumer protection violations stemming from the Cambridge Analytica data scandal in 2018.

The penalty, handed down by First Judicial District Judge Francis Joseph Mathew, caps years of litigation over allegations that Facebook systematically deceived the public regarding user privacy, data security and internal content moderation policies.

"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 the New Mexico audiences reached, and the clearly intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practice Act — $5,000 per violation found by the jury," Mathew wrote in the verdict.

New Mexico chose to pursue the case alone after 48 other states settled with Meta for $18 billion in August.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez hailed the judgment during a post-hearing news conference, calling it a historic turning point in corporate accountability.

"This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley. [It is] one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history."

The massive penalty stems from a jury verdict delivered in September, where jurors found Facebook liable for more than 43 million individual violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act.

In the 2016 Cambridge Analytica breach, a third-party app harvested the personal data of roughly 87 million users worldwide without their consent to build voter-targeting profiles for political campaigns.

During closing arguments, attorney Randi McGinn, representing the State of New Mexico, urged the court to impose penalties substantial enough to alter corporate behavior, arguing against "tech titans who think they are bulletproof and can do whatever they want".

In a video deposition played during the proceedings, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg denied those accusations, testifying that the company continually balances freedom of expression with rigorous enforcement.

Attorneys for Meta argued that any fine should be capped at $3.4 billion. Its chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement that the company is confident that it will "prevail on 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 in the statement. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."

Wednesday's $25 billion order adds to a string of severe legal setbacks for Meta in New Mexico. In August, a separate New Mexico state court ruled against Meta in a high-profile child safety lawsuit, ordering the company to pay $942 million for failing to safeguard minors on Instagram and Facebook.