The state of New Mexico asked a state judge to order Meta to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in civil penalties, following a jury verdict that found the tech giant repeatedly misled users about consumer privacy on Facebook. The British political consultancy, which worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, harvested personal data from up to 87 million Facebook users via a third-party application without their explicit consent. The request was made during a penalty hearing stemming from the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, as per a report by news agency Reuters.
The Santa Fe jury reached its liability verdict on September 25. State District Judge Francis Mathew, who presided over the proceedings, will determine the exact financial penalty Meta must pay. During the hearing, counsel for both sides argued over the scale of potential damages. Attorneys for Meta argued that the state’s penalty demands were disproportionate to the specific conduct presented during the trial. Judge Mathew challenged that view from the bench, observing, “Well, when the parties go to trial, they roll the dice. They have to accept the consequences of their decision to go to trial, do they not?”
“This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price,” McGinn argued.
The legal action, initially filed in 2021, alleged that Meta deceived Facebook users across New Mexico regarding data access permissions, internal enforcement policies, and the moderation of hate speech and misinformation. During the trial, jurors reviewed 29 distinct public assertions made by Meta and its executive leadership. The panel concluded that 26 out of the 29 statements were misleading. Jurors also determined Meta committed over 43 million individual violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection statutes, calculated from the audience size of state residents and local Facebook users exposed to each deceptive statement.
State prosecutors asserted that Meta was fully aware third parties enjoyed expansive access to private user information, and claimed the company tolerated toxic or harmful posts whenever doing so aided its financial performance. Meta’s legal team pushed back during trial, arguing that state prosecutors cherry-picked isolated remarks. They added that the company had consistently acknowledged that its oversight of privacy and false content was imperfect.