Meta has been ordered to pay $25 billion in civil penalties in New Mexico after jurors found Facebook deceived consumers about privacy and its response to misinformation and hate speech, according to Reuters reporting cited by Malwarebytes Labs. Facebook users will not receive individual compensation from the penalty: Attorney General Raúl Torrez says state law assigns that money to New Mexico’s schools. Meta says it expects to prevail on appeal.
The privacy findings concerned the gap between choosing an audience for a Facebook post and controlling access by outside app developers. Judge Francis Mathew found that developers’ access depended on different settings that many users were unaware of, so restricting a post’s audience did not necessarily restrict those developers. In September, jurors identified 26 misleading statements by the company and its leadership concerning privacy, hate speech and other matters.
Read more: Meta Adds Your algorithm Controls for Facebook Feed and Reels
New Mexico’s Department of Justice put the number of statutory violations at 43,899,725, based on estimated audiences for the misleading statements. That figure counted exposure to those statements rather than individual residents whose information had been taken. The law permits a maximum penalty of $5,000 for each violation.
Mathew determined that the statutory calculation justified more than $219 billion, then lowered the award to $25 billion. He said previous penalties had not stopped Meta’s misleading conduct, citing the FTC’s $5 billion penalty from 2019. The new award is five times that earlier federal penalty.
The state brought the case in 2021 after disclosures that Cambridge Analytica had acquired personal data concerning as many as 87 million Facebook users through an outside app. Its claims under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act also challenged Facebook’s representations about enforcing rules against harmful content. The state alleged that Facebook accepted such content when it served the business.
Meta rejected the allegations, denied selling user information and argued that the state stripped statements of their context. C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, expressed confidence in an appeal; the company also argues that a penalty of this scale could breach constitutional safeguards on due process and excessive fines.
In August, 46 other states and two territories settled their Cambridge Analytica claims for about $459 million as part of a broader $17 billion Meta settlement primarily concerning teen safety. New Mexico alone pursued its Cambridge Analytica allegations through trial.
