New Mexico seeks up to $40 billion fine from Meta — Channel NewsAsia

The US state of New Mexico has asked a court to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties following a jury verdict in a case over the company’s misleading statements concerning the privacy of Facebook users’ data. The final amount of the financial penalty is to be determined by Judge Francis Mathew, who heard the case in Santa Fe.

As reported by Channel NewsAsia, the state filed the lawsuit in 2021 after the activities of British consulting company Cambridge Analytica were exposed. The company worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and collected the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app without users’ consent.

Jury verdict

The jury delivered its verdict on September 25. It reviewed 29 statements by Meta and its executives concerning third-party access to user data, the company’s approaches to hate speech and disinformation, as well as the platform’s internal policies, and found 26 of those statements misleading.

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In the jury’s view, Meta committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection law. This calculation was based on the number of Facebook users or state residents to whom each misleading statement was directed.

Positions of the parties

State law allows a judge to set a penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation. New Mexico representative Randi McGinn said that the maximum penalty would be excessive in light of constitutional guarantees of due process. At the same time, in her assessment, an amount between $35 billion and $40 billion would constitute about 20% of the possible maximum and should affect the company.

Meta attorney Matt Nicholson called the state’s demand an astronomical penalty that, in his view, would violate a number of constitutional provisions. In court documents, Meta asked for the penalty to be capped at $3.45 billion. The company also argued that it does not sell user data and that the state had not proven that any consumer was actually misled. The judge is expected to issue a decision later this month.