Meta faces $25bn penalty over Facebook privacy violations

SANTA FE: A New Mexico state court has slammed Meta Platforms with a eye-watering $25 billion penalty, delivering one of the heaviest financial judgments against a technology giant in corporate history.

The ruling, handed down by District Court Judge Francis Mathew, follows a September trial where a Santa Fe jury found the social media titan liable for deceiving state residents regarding its personal data practices and content moderation controls. Jurors concluded that Meta committed over 43 million individual violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act. Though the statutory maximum fine of $5,000 per breach initially put the state’s award at $219.5 billion, Judge Mathew reduced the ultimate total to $25 billion.

The legal battle traces its origin to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the political consultancy improperly acquired data from roughly 87 million Facebook accounts. In his filing, Judge Mathew described the company’s internal review into the breach as “willfully ineffective,” adding that senior leadership was directly involved in “repeated misstatements” regarding user privacy. He further mandated an annual interest rate of 15 per cent until Meta settles the debt in full.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said, “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law. This penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences.”

Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said, “We are confident that we will prevail on appeal. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”

Having opted out of an overarching $17 billion multi-state settlement struck by 52 other state attorneys general in August, New Mexico’s standalone gamble has paid off with an unprecedented court judgment, though Meta’s promised appeal ensures the corporate drama will drag on.