New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. The ruling follows a jury verdict in September that Meta misled consumers about how it protected their data and prevented misinformation and hate speech on its platforms.

The case began with a 2021 complaint after revelations that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to target messages at voters ahead of President Donald Trump’s first election. The judge said the jury’s findings of willful violations, their duration and repetition, the range of subjects involved, and the role of senior Facebook leaders justified the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation. That calculation came to more than $219 billion, but the judge reduced the total to $25 billion.

Meta said it would appeal. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney argued that the ruling would make doing business in New Mexico nearly impossible and said the lawsuit sought to impose a tax on speech. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the verdict established millions of violations of state law.

The Attorney General’s office called the reduced amount one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in US history. Meta was also ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in civil penalties and abatement in a separate New Mexico case over claims about product safety. In another settlement with most other state attorneys general, Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion over children’s online safety complaints; $5.3 billion of that is contingent on YouTube and TikTok installing similar measures.