New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion Over Cambridge Analytica

The Cambridge Analytica scandal is haunting Meta once more: a New Mexico judge has ordered the company to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. It is the biggest legal blow the company has absorbed this year, amid a string of other losses and settlements.

Back in September, a New Mexico jury found that Meta misled consumers about how it protected their data and how it curbed misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. The case grew out of a 2021 complaint filed after revelations that the UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to craft messages aimed at swaying voters ahead of Donald Trump's first election.

A record sum, trimmed by the judge

The judge concluded that 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" and other factors justified the maximum penalty allowed under the law — $5,000 per violation. That would have totaled more than $219 billion, but the judge reduced it to $25 billion.

Even the smaller figure, according to the attorney general's office, remains "one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history" and dwarfs other recent rulings against Meta. In a separate New Mexico case, the company was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion for misleading the public about the safety of its products. A settlement with most other states' attorneys general over kids' online safety complaints came to $17.1 billion, though $5.3 billion of that hinges on whether YouTube and TikTok adopt similar measures.

How both sides responded

Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the ruling "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," arguing that the lawsuit "seeks to impose a tax on speech" and new rules for what people may say online. The company says it is confident it will prevail on appeal.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, for whom this is another victory over Meta, struck a triumphant note: "This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal. It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences. New Mexico stood its ground."

Source: The Verge