Meta, which has fought numerous youth safety lawsuits this year, now faces a $25 billion penalty for violating New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. The order, made Wednesday by a New Mexico judge, is the latest development in a lawsuit filed against Meta by the state in 2021.
The case stemmed from the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the U.K.-based data firm employed by Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign exploited Facebook features to harvest and misappropriate the personal data of more than 50 million users.
New Mexico’s lawsuit argued that Facebook generally misled consumers about its data privacy practices, as well as its efforts to moderate misinformation and hate speech. Last month, a New Mexico jury found Meta liable for nearly 44 million violations of the state’s consumer protection statute.
The jury found that Facebook’s unfair and deceptive practices extended to messaging shared by its executives, including Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s then-chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Facebook continued making public representations concerning users’ control of data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and equal enforcement after employees, researchers, and senior personnel had internally identified that Facebook could not make good on its public promises,” Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in his decision.
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Meta said the decision and penalty make it “all but impossible” to do business in New Mexico, according to a statement obtained by Yahoo! Finance.
“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” said C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer. “We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission separately levied a record $5 billion penalty against Facebook for violating consumers’ privacy.
In August, Meta made a $17 billion settlement with states that sued the company for allegedly designing addictive platforms. Earlier that month, a separate New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay nearly $1 billion in a different case about youth mental health and data privacy.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement that the consumer privacy lawsuit made clear that companies must abide by the state’s consumer protection laws.
“This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal,” Torrez said. “It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences.”
