A New Mexico Judge Fines Meta $25bn Over Years of Lies About Facebook Data
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25bn (£18.6bn) — the largest fine the company has faced over its business practices — following a two-week trial that found it had spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data.
In that trial, a jury found Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times.
Meta's head lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico, and that the company intends to appeal — a move he said will be successful.
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Meta disputes the whole premise: its lawyer called the case a tax on speech designed to impose new rules for what people can say online, and says the appeal he intends to file will succeed. That reframing is the real fight — a state's claim about how data was handled being argued as a national speech question.
But the statements New Mexico sued over weren't musings about speech. They were repeated assurances that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without permission, when in fact it had been — and the state's lawyers claimed the dishonesty touched the entire population of New Mexico, roughly two million people.