THE BIGGEST ONE YET! A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25 billion, the BBC reported. It is the largest fine ever levied against the company for its business practices.
It follows a two-week trial earlier this year that found Meta spent years lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The state also accused Meta of misleading people about how it profited from hate speech and how it enforced its own rules, and the jury agreed on those claims too. Jurors found Meta broke state law more than 40 million times.
Judge Francis Mathew called the violations “willful” and said they spanned “more than 11 years,” from 2010 to 2021. He wrote that communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.” “The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well,” he said, going to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”
Get this: the full penalty was calculated at $219 billion. The judge cut it to $25 billion, roughly what Meta earns in profit each quarter. The state had asked for up to $40 billion. Meta argued anything over $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional.
Meta’s top lawyer CJ Mahoney said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” called the suit “a tax on speech,” and said Meta will appeal and win. Attorney General Raúl Torrez fired back: “No corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.” For scale, the FTC’s 2019 privacy fine was $5 billion. This one is five times that.
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration by Bugle Blast.
Sources: BBC News
Leave a Reply