A US court has ordered Facebook’s parent company Meta to pay $25 billion, finding that it deceived millions of users regarding the collection and sharing of their private data.
The decision comes from New Mexico Judge Francis Mathew on Wednesday, October 21, as a result of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that revealed how Facebook data was being used without consent.
But the most interesting part of the ruling is where the money will go. The fine will be paid to public education under New Mexico consumer protection laws, rather than to affected Facebook users.
Meta violated rules on data privacy, misinformation and hate speech by making false statements, the court said in a statement issued by Reuters.
Interestingly, the judge initially calculated that penalties of $219 billion are warranted by state law, but later settled on $25 billion.
The case dates back to revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, obtained information from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party application.
New Mexico’s attorney general filed the lawsuit in 2021, accusing the company of misleading people about who could access their information.
Meta has denied the claims, saying that it does not sell consumers’ personal data and that the state did not prove that consumers were actually harmed. The company plans to challenge the ruling.
The ruling is the latest in a series of child safety cases against Meta that have resulted in dozens of millions of dollars in penalties for the company so far this year in New Mexico.Â
