A judge in New Mexico ordered social media giant Meta to pay a $25 billion judgment Wednesday for deceiving users about how it handled their personal data, a penalty the state’s attorney general said appeared to be the largest of its kind ever issued.
Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in a 20-page ruling that the wrongdoing involved Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and stood at the heart of the company’s business.
“The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate,” the judge wrote. “To induce users to provide their personal information to Facebook, Facebook made many false promises respecting the security and control of that data over the course of more than a decade.”
The judgment is a fresh blow to Meta, which repeatedly has been dealt defeats in court this year. It extends state Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s winning record against the company, following victories this year in child safety cases. Torrez (D) said the result should send a message to other tech companies that his office will hold them accountable.
“Today’s judgment from a state which, admittedly, is not very big in terms of population, should be a clear warning to everyone in Big Tech,” Torrez said at a news conference.
Meta said it would appeal the result and was confident it would succeed in higher courts.
“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,” said C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”
While the judgment is almost certain to be appealed, it is larger than the settlement of up to $18 billion Meta agreed to in August to resolve child safety allegations brought by states. The company also agreed to impose new restrictions on teenagers’ accounts, including blocking access between midnight and 6 a.m.
New Mexico did not join in that settlement, which also involved many states resolving similar data privacy cases for $460 million.
Torrez has taken a different path, with New Mexico pursuing its own cases through the state courts. The state first won a jury verdict on child safety claims in March and then prevailed again before a state judge months later.
Torrez said the $25 billion awarded Wednesday would be allocated to school construction under New Mexico law, representing a huge windfall for a state that approved a $1.5 billion capital budget this year.
The case had its roots in 2018 revelations about the use of Facebook data by the Republican-aligned political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The now-closed company improperly obtained users’ data to target political ads, prompting a reckoning about privacy in the social media era.
But the case New Mexico’s lawyers presented to a jury in September aimed to paint a broader picture about the way in which Meta sought to gain access to vast amounts of user data and failed to effectively combat misinformation on Facebook.
The company took advantage of its users’ lack of knowledge about their privacy settings and misrepresented the level of control they had over their information, in an effort that Mathew wrote amounted to a “systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model.”
On Sept. 25, jurors concluded that Meta had committed 43,899,725 “willful violations” of state consumer protection laws.
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