A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta to pay $US25 billion after a jury found the tech giant had misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against a company in American history.
"Facebook's wrongdoing - over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public - goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order following the verdict.
Mathew found that a penalty of more than $US219 billion was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion.
In a statement, C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer, said the company is confident it will win on appeal.
“This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," Mahoney said.
"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."
The company had previously said a penalty in the billions of dollars risked violating its constitutional rights to due process and protection from excessive fines.
The penalty is the largest levied against the tech giant in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2019, the company was hit with a $US5 billion penalty by the US Federal Trade Commission stemming from the same scandal.
Six other states settled their lawsuits related to Cambridge Analytica for $459.2 million as part of a $17.1 billion multistate settlement Meta reached in August to resolve states' claims that the company's platforms had harmed teen mental health.
New Mexico's attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation posted on the platform and other internal policies.
The company knew that third parties had broad access to users' personal data, and it tolerated hate speech or other harmful content when it benefited the company's bottom line, the state said.
Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, worked for Trump's successful presidential campaign in 2016, and gained access to the personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for the purposes of voter profiling and targeting. It obtained that information without users' consent from a researcher who had been allowed by Facebook to deploy an app on its social media network.
"It has been a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable," Torrez told a press conference in Albuquerque after the ruling.
"I think today's judgment is a clear break with that past and a very clear warning to those in this space and beyond that we intend to protect our people and protect our consumers."
Analyst Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson & Co, called the ruling costly but unlikely to impact the company's value.
"Meta is worth nearly two trillion dollars, and will likely continue to appeal these cases and drag them out," Luria said.
In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $US3.45 billion, saying a higher penalty ran the risk of scaring businesses out of the state. The evidence showed that Meta does not sell user data and New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, the company said in court filings.
The verdict was the second in six months by a Santa Fe jury in a lawsuit brought by the state of New Mexico against Meta Platforms.
