Source : Perth Now news
A judge in New Mexico has ordered Meta Platforms to cough up after a jury found the company 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.
“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 $US219 billion ($A311 billion) was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $US25 billion ($A36 billion).
A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The state’s attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, 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.
Jurors on September 25 found that 26 of 29 statements made by the company and its leadership on those issues were misleading. They said the company had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, based on the number of Facebook users or New Mexico residents who were the audience for each misleading statement.
State law allows a penalty of up to $US5,000 ($A7,110) per violation, and directs that all of the money go to New Mexico’s school system, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez told reporters after the verdict.
In court filings, Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalties at $US3.45 billion ($A4.91 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.
