The Cambridge Analytica scandal has come back to haunt Meta after a New Mexico judge ordered it to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices law. The ruling marks the biggest legal hit Meta has taken this year, even as it’s faced several other losses or settlements.
A New Mexico jury ruled in September that Meta misled consumers over how it protected their data and prevented misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. The case stemmed from a 2021 complaint in the wake of the revelations a few years earlier that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to pinpoint messages that would resonate with voters leading up to President Donald Trump’s first election. The judge found 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 highest penalty allowed under the law, at $5,000 per violation. That brings the total civil penalties to more than $219 billion, but the judge reduced it to $25 billion.
“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,” Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney 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. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
“New Mexico stood its ground”
Even this smaller sum is “one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history,” according to the AG’s office, and dwarfs other recent rulings and settlements involving Meta. In another landmark ruling in New Mexico state court, Meta was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1 billion in civil penalties and abatement for misleading the public about the safety of its products. In a separate agreement with most other state AGs, Meta settled an array of kids online safety complaints for $17.1 billion — but $5.3 billion of that is contingent on YouTube and TikTok installing similar measures.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez issued a triumphant statement after the latest in his string of wins against Meta (though the company managed to fight off many of the business changes the AG asked for in the remedies portion of the kids online safety case). “This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal,” Torrez said. “It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences. New Mexico stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law.”
Update, October 21st: Added statement from Meta.