Meta ordered to pay New Mexico $25 billion for violating consumer protection laws
A judge has ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the social media giant liable for violating consumer protection laws.
Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District of New Mexico in Santa Fe handed down the judgment. The state had asked for a penalty of between $35 billion and $45 billion.
Meta told ABC News on Wednesday that it will appeal the judgment.
In September, jurors found Meta liable for violating New Mexico's consumer protection laws when the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica used Facebook user data to generate targeted political ads in the 2016 general election.
The jury found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection laws.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said during an unrelated news conference on Wednesday that the judgment is the "single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history."
Torrez said the money the state receives in the judgment will go into the state's education fund.
"We intend to do everything in our power to make sure that those resources are eventually delivered to the state of New Mexico for the benefit of its people," Torrez said. "More importantly, I think today's judgment from a state which, admittedly, is not very big in terms of population, should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech."
Torrez said the evidence the state compiled in its lawsuit against Meta revealed that the company "lied to its users, to consumers, and to people all over the world about the extent to which they can control the information that they make available on their social media profiles."
Forty-eight other states have settled with Facebook over similar allegations, but New Mexico decided to sue Meta on its own.
During the trial, the state accused Facebook of deceiving its users about a data breach stemming from a third-party personality quiz that obtained data from about 87 million Facebook profiles. The data was then sold to Cambridge Analytica, which generated targeted political ads.
Cambridge Analytica went out of business in 2018 in the wake of the firestorm about the targeted ads.
During its closing argument in the case, Meta's attorneys slammed the state's evidence as outdated and that despite having five years to gather material, New Mexico found only one other instance of a data breach.
"This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," C.J. Mahoney, Meta's Chief Legal Officer, said in a statement to ABC News on Wednesday afternoon. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."
Mahoney said the company is "confident we will prevail on appeal."
"In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe and free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge," Mahoney said.
ABC News' Elizabeth Schulze contributed to this report.
