A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay the state $25bn (£18.5bn) in civil penalties over misleading statements about user privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the largest penalty yet imposed on the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
Judge Francis Mathew of the state district court in Santa Fe issued the order on Wednesday, following a jury verdict in September that found the company had breached New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. Reuters, the Associated Press and CNBC reported the ruling, which is subject to appeal.
The sum dwarfs the $5bn penalty Meta paid the US Federal Trade Commission in 2020 over the same data scandal and exceeds the multistate child-safety settlement of up to $18bn the company agreed in August. Meta has said it will appeal against the September verdict.
The jury found on 25 September that 26 of 29 public statements made by Facebook and its leadership were misleading, covering the company's response to the Cambridge Analytica breach and its handling of hate speech and misinformation. The jury decided liability and the number of violations; the judge alone set the penalty.
Judge Mathew found that the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation, which comes to about $219bn, was justified, before reducing the amount Meta must pay to $25bn. In his written order, reported by CNBC, he cited "the involvement of senior Facebook leadership" and the "clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements". The company's wrongdoing, he wrote, went "to the heart of Facebook's core business practices".
The state had asked for between $35bn and $40bn. Meta had argued that penalties should be capped at $3.45bn and that anything far higher would breach its constitutional right to due process. Its trial lawyer, Matt Nicholson, told the court that a sum as high as $40bn would be "shocking to the conscience", according to AP.
Raúl Torrez, the New Mexico attorney general, told a news conference that the award was "one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history."
"This judgement should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley," Mr Torrez said.
Under the state constitution, consumer-protection penalties are directed to education spending. "We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years," Mr Torrez said, while acknowledging that the money would be tied up if Meta appeals as expected. Interest accrues on the penalty during any appeal, AP reported; CNBC put the rate at 15% a year under the terms of the filing.
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the amount, AP reported. After the September verdict, its spokesman Alex Burgos said: "We disagree with the verdict and will continue to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record,"
The company argued at trial that it does not sell user data, that the state had not shown any consumer was actually misled, and that counting one violation for every New Mexican reached by each statement was unprecedented. Each misleading statement was multiplied by the number of Facebook users in the state or the state's population, producing the 43 million total.
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 by Mr Torrez's predecessor, Hector Balderas. It stems from the revelation that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consultancy that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, harvested the data of as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
Randi McGinn, outside counsel for the state, had urged the judge at a penalty hearing on 1 October to impose a sum large enough to change the company's behaviour. "This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," she said.
New Mexico stayed out of the multistate settlement over social media addiction and child safety that Meta reached in August with a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general, co-led by California. That deal, worth between $16.7bn and $18bn depending on contingent payments according to differing reports, contained no admission of liability and released Meta from future Cambridge Analytica claims in the states that signed.
Wednesday's order is the second large penalty against Meta in New Mexico this year. In a separate child-safety case, a Santa Fe jury ordered the company in March to pay $375m, and a judge in August added $567m for a youth-harm fund, bringing that total to $942m. Meta is contesting that ruling too.
Meta's shares were trading about 2% higher after the penalty was announced, AP reported, ahead of the company's third-quarter results due later on Wednesday.
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