According to reports by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on October 22, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has been fined the largest amount ever imposed on its business activities.
On the 21st, a judge in New Mexico ordered the company to pay a fine of $25 billion (approximately 166.9 billion RMB).
These falsehoods not only involve Facebook's data handling procedures, but also touch upon "the very foundation of Facebook’s core business operations".
Meta's Chief Legal Officer, CJ Mahoney, stated that the ruling makes it nearly impossible for the company to operate in New Mexico. The company plans to appeal, and Mahoney said the appeal will be successful.
This is the largest fine imposed on Meta to date. This year, the company has also been fined or agreed to settlements in several other lawsuits, including a $18 billion settlement agreement with California regarding child safety issues.
This lawsuit in New Mexico stems from Meta’s role in what later became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The company uses data and information from millions of Facebook users to conduct political consulting work, including work related to the 2016 U.S. presidential elections; it was during those elections that Donald Trump was elected for the first time.
New Mexico also accused Meta of profiting from content containing hate speech and of deliberately misleading the public regarding the enforcement of relevant rules. The jury determined that Meta also deliberately misled the public regarding these statements.
Meta denied these accusations. Mahoney added, “Essentially, this lawsuit attempts to tax speech in order to enforce new rules regarding what people can say online.”
A lawyer from New Mexico sued the company because Meta executives have repeatedly stated that user data was never shared or accessed by third parties without the user's permission, but this is not the case.
They claim that all of the state’s population—about 2 million people—has been affected by Meta’s dishonest practices in terms of user data control. The jury determined that Meta violated state laws more than 40 million times.
"For years, powerful technology companies have always operated outside the law, as if their scale and influence put them above legal constraints," said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on August 21st.
Today's results demonstrate that no company is powerful enough to evade accountability.
The state lawyers seek a fine of up to $40 billion against Meta. Meta argues that a fine of over $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional.
Judge Francis Matthew ruled in his decision that the fine should be roughly equivalent to Meta’s quarterly profits. He stated that Meta’s actions were “intentional” in violation of laws and in making false statements about how Facebook’s data was used and shared with the public. This behavior continued for “more than 11 years,” from 2010 to 2021.
Matthew Judge wrote in his decision that communications between executives including Mark Zuckerberg "were aimed at misleading the public."
Although the fines imposed on Meta, based on thousands of violations of state laws, totaled $219 billion, Judge Matthew reduced the fines to $25 billion.
Previously, in 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission imposed a fine of $5 billion on the company due to data privacy violations.
