A Santa Fe jury found Friday that Meta misled New Mexico residents in a case tied to the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal. The verdict leaves Judge Francis Mathew to set monetary penalties, and marks the second finding against Meta in a New Mexico courtroom in six months.
Jury sides with New Mexico over Cambridge Analytica
A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, ruled Friday that Meta Platforms misled the state's residents in a case stemming from Cambridge Analytica's access to Facebook user data without consent. The two-week trial followed a lawsuit New Mexico's attorney general filed in 2021. That suit came three years after 2018 news reports revealed that Cambridge Analytica, which had worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app to profile voters.
The lawsuit accused Meta of misleading New Mexicans about how their data was shared with third parties, how the platform handled hate speech and misinformation, and whether some users got preferential treatment in policy enforcement. State attorneys said Facebook did not tell users it was selling their data to outsiders, and allowed hate speech or misinformation to spread when it helped the company's bottom line. Judge Francis Mathew will now determine the monetary penalties Meta owes for the violations the jury found.
The case centered on statements by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and company blog posts that, according to the state, led people to believe they controlled their shared personal information and that the platform applied uniform policies on hate speech and misinformation. Meta's attorneys countered that the statements were cherry-picked snippets stripped of context in which the company had acknowledged its handling of misinformation and privacy was not perfect, and argued Meta does not benefit from harmful content on its platform. The company also denied selling user information.
Second New Mexico verdict against Meta in six months
This is the second time in six months a Santa Fe jury has ruled against Meta. In March, a jury there found the company misled users about young people's safety on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties. A second phase of that trial directed the company to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and to implement measures protecting teen users of Facebook and Instagram in the state.
Weeks after that ruling, Meta reached a settlement with 47 states, Washington, D.C., and US territories, agreeing to pay a maximum of about $16.7 billion to resolve claims it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children. As part of that deal, Meta agreed to pay a handful of states that had sued it over the Cambridge Analytica privacy violations $459 million to settle those cases. New Mexico was not part of that settlement, so its Cambridge Analytica case proceeded to trial instead.
Meta still faces thousands of lawsuits from individuals, school districts and other government entities over claims it fostered a youth mental health crisis. Trials in those teen-harm cases are set for October and February.
Sources: Reuters, Investing.com
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