New Mexico Seeks Up to $40 Billion from Meta

New Mexico has asked a judge to fine Meta as much as $40 billion after a jury found the company misled Facebook users in the state about the privacy of their data.

The jury ruled on 25 September after reviewing 29 statements from Meta and its executives. It decided 26 were misleading, and counted more than 43 million breaches of state consumer law, one for each person who would have seen those statements. Judge Francis Mathew, who heard the case in Santa Fe, now sets the figure. The law allows up to $5,000 a breach.

The suit was filed in 2021, after it emerged that Cambridge Analytica, a British firm that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, had taken personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through an outside app, without their consent. New Mexico said Meta knew outsiders had wide access to user data, and that it also misled people about how it handled hate speech and false information. Meta told the jury the quotes had been pulled out of context, and that it had already admitted its systems were not perfect.

At Thursday’s hearing the argument was about the size of the fine. Randi McGinn, for the state, said charging the full $5,000 each time would be so large it would fail a constitutional fairness test. She asked for $35 billion to $40 billion, about a fifth of the legal maximum, and said the court should speak to Meta “in the only language it understands, which is money.” Meta’s lawyer, Matt Nicholson, called that an “astronomical penalty” and unconstitutional. The company wants any fine capped at $3.45 billion. It says it does not sell user data, and that the state never showed a person who was actually fooled.

Mathew said both sides had chosen to go to trial and would have to live with the result. He expects to rule later this month.