A New Mexico court has handed down a $25B civil penalty against Meta following a jury's discovery of more than 43 million violations of state consumer protection law, according to Bloomberg. The ruling ranks among the most substantial verdicts ever issued in United States legal proceedings.
The Santa Fe jury's September verdict found Meta liable for systematically deceiving Facebook users regarding privacy safeguards and the platform's hate speech enforcement. The case traces its origins to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, during which a political consulting operation obtained personal information on approximately 87 million Facebook users. New Mexico's legal team additionally contended that certain high-profile accounts received more lenient treatment under Meta's content moderation policies compared to regular users.
Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty at $25B after considering the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation, which would have totaled $219B. New Mexico's government had sought between $35B and $40B in damages, while Meta's legal representatives pushed for a cap of $3.4B, the Associated Press reported.
Facebook's wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices
Judge Francis Mathew
Meta intends to challenge the judgment. The company's attorneys characterized a penalty in the tens of billions as a "constitutional violation of epic proportions" and maintained that the jury never established that New Mexico residents encountered the misleading statements or suffered direct injury.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who initiated the lawsuit in 2021, described the award as "one of the single largest, if not the largest, single-state verdict against a company in American history." Proceeds from the settlement will be directed toward a state education fund.
The $25B figure surpasses New Mexico's projected general-fund revenue of $14.8B for fiscal 2028 and exceeds the roughly $18B Meta agreed to distribute among most United States states in August following harm to adolescent users. New Mexico declined participation in those multistate settlements, choosing instead to pursue independent litigation despite Meta's warnings that the state's child safety requirements could prompt the company to exit the region.
New Mexico has already secured additional victories against Meta, winning $375M in a separate child safety trial in March and obtaining a court order requiring Meta to contribute $567M to a teen health fund. Meta previously faced consequences related to Cambridge Analytica, including a $5B settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 and a $725M payment to resolve a class action lawsuit in 2022.
Source: The Next Web
