Meta Platforms Inc., owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has been slammed with a $25 billion fine, the biggest penalty ever imposed on the tech giant over its handling of user data.
The order was issued on Wednesday by a New Mexico judge following a two-week trial in which a jury found that Meta spent years deceiving the public about its data practices.
According to the court, Meta’s deception went beyond privacy claims.
“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” the judge held, saying the falsehoods went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”
Reacting, Meta’s Chief Legal Officer, CJ Mahoney, faulted the ruling, arguing that it made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” He said the company would appeal and expressed confidence that the appeal would succeed.
The $25bn sanction is the largest in Meta’s history, coming in the same year it reached an $18bn settlement with California over child safety concerns.
The New Mexico case traces back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Meta was still operating as Facebook. Cambridge Analytica had harvested data of millions of Facebook users for political consulting, including for the 2016 US presidential election won by Donald Trump.
The state also accused Meta of misleading the public on how it profited from hate speech content and how it enforced its rules against such content. The jury agreed that the company intentionally misled the public on both counts.
Meta denied the claims, insisting that “at its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”
Prosecutors argued that Meta executives repeatedly told users their data was never shared with third parties without consent, even though evidence showed otherwise. New Mexico said its entire population of about two million people was affected by the practice, with the jury finding over 40 million violations of state law.
Commenting on the verdict, New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said: “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law. Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.”
