Meta must pay $25 billion to New Mexico after a jury found the tech giant guilty of nearly 44 million violations of state consumer protection laws.
The largest fine to ever hit Meta came after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez declined to join an $18 billion settlement Meta reached earlier this year with attorneys general in nearly all states.
In his opinion Wednesday, US district court judge Francis J. Mathew said there was no “bright line rule” for determining the appropriate penalty for Meta’s repeated and willful deception of users since 2010 about their “control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement.”
New Mexico had asked the court to impose even higher fines, up to $40 billion. The entire state of 2 million people were harmed by Meta’s conduct, Torrez argued, and it seemed dubious that Meta would make meaningful changes unless the penalty impacted Meta’s stock price.
Mathew found that the trial record—which showed that top leadership, including Mark Zuckerberg, were aware that the company, then known as Facebook, was making misleading public representations—supported “the highest level of penalty allowed by the NW Unfair Practices Act.”
“The jury was unequivocal: Facebook systematically misled the public” and “took advantage of the public’s lack of knowledge respecting Facebook’s practices to a grossly unfair degree,” Mathew wrote.
To Mathew, it seemed that Meta made a choice to avoid transparency with users in a bid to capitalize on data they didn’t realize they were sharing and better compete with one of its main rivals, the platform then known as Twitter.
“The violations the jury found were not the product of a single misleading statement or isolated incident,” Mathew noted. “They arose from repeated public representations over more than 11 years, concerning multiple core aspects of Facebook’s platform and business.”
