The sun never sets on litigation against Meta. And for so many crimes, too: violating privacy, harming children, profiting off of scam ads, using copyrighted work without consent to train AI… You name it, Meta is guilty of it. It’s a terrible company! And the amazing thing is that Meta is consistently being found guilty by judges and juries, huzzah! Back in August, before letting another case get to a guilty verdict, Meta reached a landmark $17 billion settlement with 47 states over a lawsuit about the company knowingly designing addictive products that hurt young people’s mental health. It was one of the highest sums ever paid by a tech company to states. Well, New Mexico just said, “Hold my legal beer.” Last month, a jury in the land of enchantment found Meta guilty of 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws, dating back a decade to Cambridge Analytica using personal data obtained from Facebook. On Wednesday, the judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion, the biggest fine Mark Zuckerberg’s fiefdom has ever faced. It couldn’t have happened to a more deserving company.

Facebook’s deception was intentional and executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked, state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote in his ruling.

“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said.

Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws for making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data. The case was brought after political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested Facebook data to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election season.

The award will serve as a warning to tech companies that New Mexico will hold them accountable, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez said at a news conference.

“This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” he said.

Meta said the ruling and Torrez’s office’s approach to enforcement “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.”

“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal,” C.J. Mahoney, the company’s chief legal officer, said in a statement.

…“Right now, they are rolling out Muse, an AI assistant encouraging people to trust it with everything from their bank accounts to their medical information,” added Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project. “Which is why we need more enforcers with courage and laws with actual teeth to rein them in.”

At the trial, attorneys for the state cited a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that the company didn’t sell user data.

“You have control over how your information is shared,” Zuckerberg said. “We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.”

New Mexico officials sought fines of $35 billion to $40 billion, arguing the company would only change if its stock price were impacted.

Meta’s lawyers, meanwhile, asserted that the state failed to prove the company made misleading statements and that content moderation actually harmed people in New Mexico. They wanted the company to pay $3.4 billion at most and said an award many times larger would be unconstitutional.

Although interest would accrue on the penalty during the appeal process, Meta could succeed in reducing the number of violations for which it is found liable.

The $25 billion award far exceeds a $5 billion fine the Federal Trade Commission levied against Facebook in 2019.

[From AP News]

Zuck: “Users control how their info is shared, we never have and never will sell your info!” Meta lawyers: “New Mexico failed to prove the company made misleading statements!” They almost make it too easy. Anyway, bravo to the great state of New MEXICO (now and forever), because they have been uncowed by the tech giant in case after case. That $17 billion settlement with 47 states? (Where the State AGs were originally seeking $200 billion, by the way.) Yeah, NM was one of the few who said, “No thanks, we’ll see you in court.” And here’s another: this past spring, an NM jury found Meta guilty of putting kids at risk for sexual exploitation. Awful fact: during that trial, Zuck and Instagram head Adam Mosseri said in depositions that sexual exploitation on their platforms was “inevitable.”) Meta was ordered to pay the maximum penalty allowed, $5,000 per violation, which added up to $375 million. Someone did the math on this current case, and $25 billion comes out to around $12,000 per NM resident. (Not that each resident will be getting a check; the state’s constitution directs that the money go to education spending.) Thanks for leading the way, New Mexico, and may your sister states follow in tenacity.

PS — Heed that warning and don’t trust Meta’s Muse AI agent!

Photos Credit: Daniel Torok/Avalon,Tierney L. Cross/POOL via CNP/INSTARimages.com