New Mexico Seeks Up to $40 Billion From Meta

New Mexico has asked a judge to impose $35 billion to $40 billion in penalties on Meta after a jury found the company made misleading statements about Facebook users’ data privacy and other platform practices. Meta is seeking to cap any penalty at $3.45 billion. Judge Francis Mathew’s ruling on the amount remains pending and is expected later in October. The penalty request followed a jury verdict on September 25 in a lawsuit New Mexico filed in 2021. Jurors examined 29 statements made by Meta and its leadership and found 26 misleading. They determined that the statements resulted in more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection law. Reports describe the count as based on the Facebook users or New Mexico residents who saw the statements, but do not clarify the population used for each calculation. The lawsuit alleged that Meta misled users about who could access their personal information and how the company handled hate speech and misinformation on Facebook. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the British political consulting firm harvested personal data from Facebook users without their consent.