By Kevin Hendricks, NM Political Report — Meta now has a $25 billion reason to read the fine print.
District Judge Francis Mathew ordered Meta Platforms Inc. on Wednesday to pay New Mexico $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about their privacy, misinformation, hate speech and more. The bill grows 15% a year until Meta pays, roughly $10.3 million a day.
Mathew ruled that the jury’s 43,899,725 violations justified the law’s maximum $5,000 per violation, nearly $219.5 billion. He then cut the total to $25 billion, about $570 per violation.
“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement. His office called it one of the largest penalties against a corporation in U.S. history.
How the judge got there
Mathew pointed to 26 deceptive statements spanning more than 11 years, many from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg. Facebook kept making those promises after its own employees warned it couldn’t keep them, he found.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook vowed to tell users when apps misused their data. It notified users of just two apps out of thousands, the order says. Apps tied to misuse touched data from at least 1.1 million New Mexicans.
The order also quotes a private Zuckerberg email about rolling out a privacy change: “Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don’t encourage it.”
Meta’s side
At a hearing this month, Meta asked the judge to limit the penalty to $3.45 billion, while the state asked for $35 billion to $40 billion. Meta attorney Matthew Nicholson argued a massive fine would violate the excessive-fines protections in both the state and U.S. constitutions, and that the state never showed any New Mexican saw, relied on or was harmed by the statements.
Torrez said Meta has signaled it will appeal.
What happens next
Mathew held off on injunctive relief, such as the independent monitor the state wants, pending more briefing. An appeal could take three or four years, Torrez said, and the 15% interest keeps running the whole time.
Once the money arrives, the state constitution dedicates Unfair Practices Act penalties to school construction and other capital projects, Torrez said. At $25 billion, he joked, the state “may have in fact paid for the construction of schools” for the next several hundred years.
New Mexico went it alone. Meta paid $459 million this summer to resolve cases from 46 states and two territories. Torrez said he’d let others decide whether $25 billion for one state counts as a victory.
It’s the state’s second big win over Meta this year. In a separate child safety case, a jury ordered $375 million in March and a judge added $567 million in August, bringing the state’s total against Meta to nearly $26 billion.
Torrez wants lawmakers to rewrite the Unfair Practices Act in the coming session. The $5,000 penalty cap hasn’t been adjusted for inflation in more than 50 years, he said.