SANTA FE, October 22 (Aalimi Nation) – A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about the privacy of their personal data, the largest penalty ever imposed on the company. The Meta privacy fine, ordered by District Judge Francis Mathew on Wednesday, follows a jury verdict last month, and Meta has said it will appeal.

Jurors found that Meta committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws. They concluded that 26 of 29 public statements examined at trial, made by the company and its leadership about privacy and content moderation, were misleading. Jurors rejected claims that Facebook made false statements about removing harmful content, including COVID-19 misinformation.

The judge wrote that the deception was intentional and that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked. "Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false," he said in his ruling.

The case was filed in 2021. It grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the now-defunct British political consulting firm obtained data from as many as 87 million Facebook users without consent and used it for targeted political advertising.

The state had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion. Meta's lawyers argued that the state failed to prove misleading statements or harm, asked for no more than about $3.4 billion, and said a far larger award would be unconstitutional. A company lawyer told the court that a sum as high as $40 billion would be "shocking to the conscience".

For comparison, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion in 2019. Under the New Mexico Constitution, money from consumer protection fines goes to education spending, and Attorney General Raúl Torrez has said the proceeds will go to a fund for the state's schools.

Torrez called the judgment "a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley" and said New Mexico would hold technology companies accountable.

Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the ruling made it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico" and described the suit as an attempt to "impose a tax on speech". He said the company was confident it would prevail on appeal. A representative of a competition-policy advocacy group called the award "a drop in the bucket" for a company with a market value of about $1.8 trillion.

Interest will accrue while the appeal proceeds, and the state may wait years to collect. An appeals court could reduce the number of violations and, with it, the final sum.

This is not Meta's first defeat in New Mexico this year. In March, a jury found the company had misled users about the safety of young people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and ordered $375 million in civil penalties. A judge later ordered a further $567 million into a state fund for teen mental health and required safety measures for young users. Meta has said it will appeal the later order.