Please follow us on Gab, Minds, Telegram, Rumble, Truth Social, Gettr, X, Youtube, Instagram
Originally published at CDM.
Meta must pay $25 billion in penalties related to how it handled user data, a New Mexico court ruled Wednesday, according to a court filing obtained by CNBC. The ruling stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the personality quiz operated by a third party harvested data from roughly 87 million Facebook user profiles and that data was then used by Cambridge Analytica to create targeted political ads for the 2016 election – including for the Trump campaign, ABC News reported. The jury in the case attributed the more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act to Facebook’s harvesting of data from Facebook users’ profiles.
The Trump campaign was one of the clients of Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 election. Facebook settled jointly with 48 other states, ABC News reported. New Mexico, however, decided to go it alone and file its own case, which went to trial.
The finding of fact by Judge Francis Mathew stated that Facebook’s top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, had misrepresented the social media company’s data privacy practices to the public. The finding went on to state that those misrepresentations were part of a unified plan to deceive the public and that Facebook never conducted the privacy review that it had promised after the Cambridge Analytica disclosures had become public. The findings also stated that Facebook’s internal review of apps was “willfully ineffective” due to several factors including the attempts of senior executives to slash spending, scarce enforcement resources, poor investigative methods and a desire to avoid creating a precedent.
In terms of whether or not Meta actually deceived users, Mahoney told CNBC that Meta expected to win its appeal and that this ruling would leave it almost unable to operate in the state of New Mexico. CBS News quoted him calling the suit a “tax on speech.” The company had already announced an appeal of the verdict handed down in September. (The suit was first filed by then-NM Attorney General Balderas in 2021.)
He’s now New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. CNBC reported that Torrez said the big technology companies have behaved as if the law did not apply to them, but that in New Mexico, they will be held accountable. And the money, under the state constitution, will go to education funding, which by his estimate could cover building new schools for 100 years, though it is held in place while the appeal moves forward. He called the ruling one of the biggest state verdicts against a company in U.S. history. Torrez had inherited the case after his predecessor, Hector Balderas, had brought the case in 2021.
That case involved a host of child safety and mental health complaints connected to the use of personal data by third parties including Cambridge Analytica in the 2016 US presidential election. While that matter was resolved in a federal case before a group of state attorneys general across the country with a $17 billion settlement, the New Mexico matter was a state case that went to trial. ABC News reported that the stock price of Facebook’s parent company rose some 2% around the time the penalty was disclosed, on the day that the company was to report on its most recent quarter. Other big losses for the company in the state included a $375 million verdict under the state’s unfair practices act in a child safety case in March followed by a judge’s order to pay $567 million to an abatement fund after he ruled that the company’s conduct was a public nuisance.
Get the latest on NYC and the Empire State delivered straight to your inbox
