Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was ordered by a New Mexico judge on Wednesday to pay $25 billion for misleading users about how it collects and safeguards user data. The penalty, one of the largest ever levied against Meta or any other company, is the latest legal hit to the social media giant, which has grappled with lawsuits over allegations of social media addiction and child safety. New Mexico sued the company in 2021 after revelations surfaced that a U.K. political consulting firm had harvested millions of Facebook users’ personal data without their consent.
The major data privacy scandal sparked more scrutiny of Facebook and led to lawsuits, congressional hearings and multibillion-dollar fines. A New Mexico jury dealt a blow to Meta, previously named Facebook, in September, finding that the social media company committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws by making false and misleading statements about data privacy protections and efforts to combat misinformation and hate speech. Raúl Torrez said in a statement.
As part of the jury’s ruling, Meta faced up to $5,000 for each willful violation, according to a news release about the verdict. Meta said in a statement it plans to appeal the ruling. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.
We are confident we will prevail on appeal,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. Facebook was found to have deceived its users through statements and remarks made on its own platforms, interviews, earnings calls and other channels.
The social media platform has privacy settings, but “they do not provide any meaningful control over their data in many ways,” and the company intentionally tried to mislead the public, according to the court’s judgment in the New Mexico case. The judgment also found that Facebook committed to notifying users when an app misused their data and deliberately didn’t. Meta made misleading statements about whether it sells people’s data and profits from misinformation or hate speech, along with other practices, the New Mexico jury found.
Meta has long grappled with data privacy lawsuits and complaints. The company has expanded beyond social networking and sells consumer gadgets, including smart glasses, that have also raised privacy concerns after allegations that people are being recorded without their knowledge. The company has suffered from several high-profile legal blows this year that have resulted in multibillion-dollar penalties.
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