Meta ordered to pay $25bn over Facebook user data 'lies'
A New Mexico judge imposed the largest penalty ever against Meta, tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The company says it will appeal.
A judge in the US state of New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25bn (about £18.6bn), the largest penalty ever imposed on the company for its business practices.
The ruling follows a two-week trial earlier this year in which a jury found that Meta had spent years misleading the public about how Facebook user data was handled. The state's lawyers pointed to repeated statements by executives that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without permission, when in reality it had been. The judge said the lies went to "the heart of Facebook's core business practices".
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consultancy used information from millions of Facebook users, including in work linked to the 2016 US presidential election. The jury also found that Meta had intentionally misled the public about how it benefited from hate speech and how its rules against it were enforced. New Mexico argued that its entire population of roughly two million people was affected.
Meta's chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said the decision made it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico" and described the lawsuit as an attempt to impose a tax on speech. The company plans to appeal. It has already been fined or agreed settlements in several other cases this year, including an $18bn deal with California over child safety.