A New Mexico judge sentenced Wednesday Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving the residents of this American state for more than ten years on the use of their personal data, a record sanction for the group, which denounces a “tax” on freedom of expression.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal, named after a British firm involved in the campaign that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016, revealed in 2018 the exploitation for political purposes of the data of tens of millions of Facebook users, collected without their knowledge.
It had already earned the group a fine of $5 billion in 2019 from the federal consumer protection agency (FTC), five times less than Wednesday’s sanction. New Mexico has already imposed 942 million $ on it this year in a case on the protection of minors, and the parent company of Facebook and Instagram agreed at the end of August to pay up to 18 billion in total to settle the lawsuits of 52 American states and territories on the addiction of adolescents to social networks.
According to Meta, this procedure “seeks to impose a tax on expression to enforce new rules on what people can say online”, part of its sanctioned statements relating to content moderation. The decision “makes it almost impossible to do business” in the state, reacted its legal director, CJ Mahoney, “convinced of winning on appeal”.
In the meantime, the bill will grow by $3.75 billion per year, with 15% interest until it is paid. The 25 billion already represent an eighth of the group’s annual turnover (201 billion $ in 2025), whose accounts are already weighed down by the massive investments in the race for artificial intelligence (up to 145 billion in 2026).
“For too long, powerful technology companies have acted as if their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” said state Attorney General Raul Torrez, for whom “no company is too powerful to be held accountable.” Penalties must go into an education fund.
Email from Mark Zuckerberg
On September 25, a Santa Fe jury found Facebook responsible for nearly 44 million violations of the state’s unfair trade practices law, for 26 misleading statements made between 2010 and 2021, including some coming from its boss Mark Zuckerberg and his former number two, Sheryl Sandberg.
Jurors counted, roughly, one offense per person potentially exposed for each statement in this state of 2.1 million inhabitants. At $5,000 per offense, the legal maximum, the bill reached $219.5 billion, which Judge Francis Mathew reduced to $25 billion, without explaining his choice. The State demanded between 35 and 40 billion $, Meta proposed at most 3.45 billion.
In the twenty-page judgment, consulted by AFP, the magistrate notes that after the scandal broke in 2018, Facebook had undertaken to investigate applications that had sucked up data and to warn users. It ultimately only warned those of two applications out of thousands identified.
According to the judge, Facebook’s faults, “systematically disseminated to the public”, touch “the heart” of its commercial practices, and past sanctions have not deterred the group. He has not yet ruled on the corrective measures requested by New Mexico, including an audit of the management of user data.
New Mexico is the only state to bring the Cambridge Analytica scandal to court. The others settled their claims at the end of August for $459 million, as part of the agreement on the miners.
In March, a Los Angeles jury for the first time found Meta and Google responsible for the addiction of a teenager to their platforms. Meta appealed this decision. Other lawsuits await, including the first filed by school districts, scheduled for February in federal court.
