A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay $25 billion (£18.6 billion) after a two-week trial earlier this year found the company had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data, the BBC reported. The penalty — yaani 2,500 crore dollars — is the largest ever imposed on Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Source: BBC News
Judge Francis Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under state law — yaani 21,900 crore dollars — but reduced the figure to $25 billion, the Associated Press reported via AAP. In his order, Mathew wrote that Facebook's wrongdoing, 'over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices,' and he described the violations as 'willful', spanning more than 11 years from 2010 to 2021.
Source: AAP / Associated Press
The lawsuit stemmed from Meta's role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. New Mexico's lawyers argued the state’s roughly two million residents were affected, and a jury found Meta had violated state law more than 40 million times.
What each side says
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdicts against a company in American history, and that the result showed no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable. Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said the company is confident it will win on appeal, arguing the ruling 'makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico' and that the lawsuit 'seeks to impose a tax on speech'.
The ruling adds to a string of major penalties against the tech giant this year, including an $18 billion settlement with California over child safety. In 2019, the US Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion over the same Cambridge Analytica scandal, and in August Meta reached a $17.1 billion multistate settlement over claims its platforms harmed teen mental health, of which six other states' Cambridge Analytica claims were settled for $459.2 million.
Meta's platforms are used by billions of people worldwide, including across Punjab and the diaspora. A record penalty of this size, if it survives appeal, would raise the cost of misleading users about their data for every large social-media company, not just in the United States.