The ruling

A judge at the State District Court in Santa Fe ordered Facebook's parent company Meta to pay $25 billion on Wednesday, 21 October. Judge Francis J. Mathew issued the penalty after a jury had found that the company deceived users about their data privacy. The New York Times described it as one of the largest penalties levied against the tech giant. The penalty is linked to a scandal that, as Italian reporting put it, dates back more than ten years. The sum was made public through a court filing.

How the case unfolded

New Mexico sued Meta in 2021 after it emerged that Cambridge Analytica had collected personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. The political consulting firm, which had worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, obtained the data without users' consent. The state accused the company of lying to New Mexico users about who could access their information. It also argued that Meta misled people about how it handled hate speech and false information on the platform, along with other internal policies.

A two-week trial followed in Santa Fe, and at the end of September the jury concluded that Meta had committed more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection laws. Each violation can carry a penalty of up to $5,000 under state law. The violation count was based on the number of Facebook users or New Mexico residents who were the audience for each misleading statement.

Where the money goes

Attorney General Raul Torrez told reporters after the ruling that state law requires the entire sum to flow into New Mexico's school system. The ruling is the second against Meta in New Mexico within six months. In March, jurors had decided that the company deceived users about the safety of young people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Both cases concern claims that the company deceived its users.

The scandal behind the case

The Cambridge Analytica affair came to light in 2018 and damaged public trust in Facebook over the long term. According to the reporting, information from a seemingly harmless survey by a data researcher was used to build user profiles and was shared with Cambridge Analytica. Donald Trump's then-candidate team also drew on that data before the 2016 US presidential election, and about 87 million user accounts were affected overall. Meta had earlier paid roughly $6 billion to the US government to close investigations into the matter. A whistleblower report cited in the New Mexico case alleged that some prominent accounts had been secretly exempted from rules on permitted content.