Meta lawsuit overview:
- Who: A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms Inc., formerly known as Facebook Inc., to pay $25 billion in civil penalties to the state.
- Why: A jury found Meta willfully misled the public about data privacy and other practices in 26 public statements from 2010 to 2021.
- Where: The Meta lawsuit was tried in New Mexico state court.
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found it repeatedly misled the public about its data privacy practices.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez brought the Meta lawsuit on behalf of New Mexico, with the full penalty legally directed to the state’s public school fund.
The jury found Meta committed nearly 44 million willful violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act through 26 public statements made between May 2010 and August 2021. Jurors counted violations by the number of New Mexicans each statement was expected to reach.
State law allows up to $5,000 per violation, and Judge Francis J. Mathew found New Mexico entitled to the maximum of about $219.5 billion before reducing it to $25 billion, plus 15% annual interest until paid. He reserved a ruling on injunctive relief or a court order directing Meta’s conduct.
The judge rejected Meta’s argument that its earlier $5 billion Federal Trade Commission penalty should serve as a benchmark.
“Penalties, consent agreements and decrees have not deterred Meta from using deceptive trade practices in its representations to the citizens of New Mexico in violation of New Mexico’s Act,” the judge wrote.
The Meta lawsuit ruling follows New Mexico’s third trial against Meta in seven months. The state previously won $942 million over claims Meta concealed teen mental health risks, and Meta said it expects to prevail on appeal, Law360 reports.
Judge cites Zuckerberg email on users’ data privacy settings
The judge found Facebook knew its users did not understand their privacy settings and exploited that confusion.
In a private email cited in the ruling, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that users “probably don’t understand their current privacy settings or care about who sees their updates.”
Rather than educate users, Zuckerberg chose to use that lack of understanding to push them into sharing more personal information publicly so Facebook could better compete with Twitter, the judge found.
Additionally, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal became public in March 2018, Facebook promised to investigate apps, audit suspicious ones and notify affected users. Over the next three years, however, it conducted only 14 forensic data “audits” and notified users about just two apps after narrowing its internal definition of misuse, the judge wrote in his findings.
In a separate case, Meta recently agreed to a settlement worth up to $17 billion with multiple state attorneys general, excluding New Mexico, over claims that the company concealed social media’s harms to teenagers, according to Law360.
Do you think the penalty in this Meta lawsuit goes far enough? Let us know in the comments.
The state is represented by Randi McGinn of McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers P.A. and Corban Rhodes, Adam Levitt, Daniel Schwartz, J. Gordon Bergstresser, Emma Bruder, Rebecca Trickey and Amy Keller of DiCello Levitt.
The Meta lawsuit is State of New Mexico v. Facebook Inc., Case No. D-101-CV-2021-00132, in the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico.
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