Driving the news: Judge Francis Mathew determined the amount of the penalty Wednesday, giving New Mexico a victory as the only state to take its claims to court after 48 others were settled.
- Mathew concluded that New Mexico was entitled to $219.5 billion based on the state’s maximum $5,000 penalty times 43,899,720 violations. He reduced that amount to $25 billion.
What they say: “This decision and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement makes it virtually impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” CJ Mahoney, Meta’s legal director, told Axios in an emailed statement.
- “Essentially, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules on what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal. In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe, free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge.”
Catch up quickly: In September, a New Mexico jury found Meta committed 43 million “willful violations” of New Mexico’s unfair practices law.
- Mathew found that Facebook’s privacy controls failed to give users meaningful control over their data and that third-party app developers could access their information through the platform’s systems.
- Mathew discovered that Mark Zuckerberg knew that users didn’t understand how data privacy worked and exploited that, noting that the CEO once wrote that users “probably don’t understand their current privacy settings or care who sees their updates.”
- Zuckerberg also wrote that the company should give users “the ability to change their privacy settings, but obviously doesn’t encourage it.”
Zoom out: The lawsuit follows a report revealing that data firm Cambridge Analytica collected data from more than 50 million Facebook users to create political ads during the 2016 election.
- After the scandal, Facebook promised more transparency, but the court ruled that Meta had failed to systematically inform users when their data was being misused.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with additional information throughout.
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