Meta Faces $25 Billion Penalty for Cambridge Analytica Fallout
The Cambridge Analytica controversy has resurfaced for Meta, as a New Mexico judge has mandated the company to pay $25 billion in penalties for over 43 million breaches of the state’s unfair practices law. This ruling represents the most significant legal blow Meta has faced this year, amidst a series of other setbacks and settlements.
In September, a New Mexico jury determined that Meta had misled users regarding the protection of their data and its efforts to combat misinformation and hate speech on its platforms. This case originated from a 2021 complaint following earlier revelations that the UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica had harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to tailor messages aimed at influencing voters during President Donald Trump’s initial campaign. The judge concluded that the “extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership,” among other factors, warranted the maximum penalty allowed by law, set at $5,000 per violation. While this could have totaled over $219 billion in civil penalties, the judge ultimately reduced it to $25 billion.
Meta’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, expressed concerns in a statement, saying, “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. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
Even this reduced amount is noted as “one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history,” according to the Attorney General’s office, significantly overshadowing other recent rulings and settlements involving Meta. In another significant ruling in New Mexico state court, Meta was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in civil penalties and abatement for misleading the public about the safety of its products. Additionally, in a separate agreement with most other state attorneys general, Meta settled various complaints regarding online safety for children for $17.1 billion, with $5.3 billion of that contingent on YouTube and TikTok implementing similar safety measures.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez celebrated this latest victory against Meta, stating, “This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal. It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences. New Mexico stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law.”
