Meta Platforms Inc. was ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties today after a jury found the company had misled its users on how it protects and uses their data.
In what is one of the largest fines ever leveled against a tech giant, a jury in a Santa Fe, New Mexico, found the company guilty deceiving its users. The case, going back 10 years, is related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal when Meta was Facebook Inc.
Following a two-week trial last month, the jury ruled against Meta, concluding that the company had committed 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act. With each violation carrying a penalty of up to $5,000, the state was originally awarded $219.5 billion, but Judge Francis Mathew reduced the fine to $25 billion.
“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 — $5,000 per violation found by the jury,” Judge Mathew wrote in the filing.
Meta is paying a heavy price for allegations that its platforms harm the public. In August, it agreed to a $17.1 billion settlement with dozens of U.S. states over claims it deliberately made its products addictive. A further $9.9 billion settlement charge pushed its latest quarterly profits well below Wall Street expectations. Yet business continued to boom, with revenue climbing 26%, to $64.6 billion.
The penalty will increase by 15% for every year that it’s not paid in full. With thousands of court cases in the works, most related to child safety, privacy and social media addiction, Meta has found itself in a unique, seemingly Sisyphean position where one lawsuit seems to follow another.
“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” said Raúl Torrez, the attorney general of New Mexico. “Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney disagreed, promising to win an 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,” he said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”