The class action was private, not initiated by states.
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
It's a very good point. The further upon appeal Meta goes, the more removed they get from a jury and they'll be more likely to get a favorable ruling due to the company's negative approval rating amongst the public
A jury is involved in the process. If the jury doesn't find violations, the judge can't assign penalties for those violations.
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
OK fine, it's about deterrence. Explain why are trying 100x more vigorously to deter the category 'advertising-based infractions' (which the majority of the 'victims' still don't even know happened, let alone experience any pain and suffering from) than 'negligently giving people cancer and killing them'?
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
I'm trying to puzzle together the belief system that makes your comment coherent.
You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?
Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?
Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
It's $11,737 per current resident of New Mexico by my math. So, 20+ offenses per resident of the state? Of course, many people weren't even Facebook users, so it must be even more offenses per user.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
You could sue Facebook for $25 trillion and a local jury would unanimously vote yes. These numbers don’t mean anything. This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney. You think they'd have trouble finding 12 jurors in Santa Fe, NM who dislike big tech? It is always shut down or massively reduced by a higher court.
That's not what happened here though. The penalties were defined by law, the jurors applied them. The judge already reduced most of the penalty. So... what about this case is outlandish?
All such "let's multiply one large number with another large number followed by a third large number to come up with hundreds of billions in penalities" calculations never hold up in appeals. Otherwise if the logic was sound and there were actually 43 million violations then why was it reduced from $219.5 billion to $25 billion in the first place? Like I said everyone is making up numbers, and the appeals court will make up another one.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
I don't know why the judge reduced the penalty as the article didn't state that. I don't really have anything to go on other than you saying everyone is just making up numbers. I don't find that argument convincing given my experience with the courts.
It already was. According to NM law, the sum of fines for the 43 million violations Facebook committed against New Mexico would have been $219B, but the judge was feeling kind that day.
No. $219B is the absolute maximum theoretical fine assessable at $5000/violation x 43 million counts. The $25B number is still ridiculous. Either the number of counts is too high (seems likely at 20x the population of NM) or the assessment per count is too high, but regardless, they need to arrive at a lower number.
$25B penalty that’s like a month of their revenue. This is like me paying a month’s salary as penalty - it’s not pleasant but it would definitely not impact my life style.
I agree with the rest of this super well-informed thread that we need to remove corporate limited liability so we can send executives who break the law like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes to prison. It's so wrong that we can't send these people to prison when they break the law!
The AG was in charge of the prosecution of the case but they wisely didn't handle it all by themselves. New Mexico was represented in court by DiCello Levitt LLP and McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Each probably stand to make billions if the award is upheld.
> “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 in the statement.
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
People are not notifying this nearly enough, but Meta is still going up and at it in Brazil [1] during one of the most polarized elections I've ever seen during my time.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
The book Careless People paints a picture of Zuck & Co that should cause anyone to hesitate to touch any of their products. It's a shame so much of the world runs on WhatsApp. It's a bigger shame that they were ever allowed to acquire WhatsApp in the first place.
Thanks for continuing to talk about this. It's ridiculous how much the US meddles in the elections of others and acts all :surprised-pikachu: when Russia sorta kinda meddles a bit in ONE election of their own.
Woah, I remember hearing about the Cambridge Analytica stuff for the first time in 2020 from watching "The Social Dilemma". I'm surprised there is still legal fall out from that. Also 15% interest until the fine is paid in full is wild. Wonder where they are going to get the cash given how much has been going to AI.
Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.
$0. for better or worse, they have ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. I don't think NM would/could expect to get any money from a penalty. I may misunderstand how penalties and bankruptcy work, but I would expect it's been a better use of time to try to get $$$ from Meta than a defunct entity.
> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Not necessarily the accounts or posts. They can be made to delete all the profiling data that they've collected over the years and be barred from inferring anything from user submitted past data and new data for a few years.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
> umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
>
> They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
There are much worse scandals internal to meta that get ignored because 8200.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
Yeah it is kind of sad how not stopping posts which fueled a literal genocide is hardly glanced at but Cambridge Analytica is considered a disaster of the highest order. Who died from Cambridge Analytica?
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others.
The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)
It’s crazy how these criminals can get away with it just by paying money. Sure, $25B isn’t peanuts, but this money shouldn’t have belonged to companies like Meta to begin with.
We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to. (ie. it's hyperbole, meaning "the US relies heavily on torts to enforce consumer privacy compared to other countries")
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
So basically the state of New Mexico is taking $25B from Meta's market cap, therefore whomever invested in META; and where will this money go here?
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.
All the states that participated in the class action settlement got $725 million combined.
New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
Great timing for the AG who’s up for reelection on November 3 (even though it was the previous AG who made the call).
The class action was private, not initiated by states.
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
$25B is the reduced judgment. The state was originally awarded over $200B.
>New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
No because that's still subject to appeal, unlike the settlement. "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush", etc.
That’s all framing. If they use the win for their reelection campaign…they just won’t mention the appeals process.
What are the grounds for the appeal? How does NM law look on that issue? It's a significantly reduced judgment too.
Like, yeah, you have a point in the abstract, but barring any actual supportive facts, it doesn't seem like a good point.
IANAL, but it's not hard to find answers with a trivial search, eg.
https://kieferandkiefer.com/understanding-how-jury-verdicts-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R331...
It's not a jury verdict, and I am a lawyer...
Also, a paper from RAND from 1987? Are you for real?
I'm just a standard idiot, but didn't the jury return a verdict and the judge impose a penalty per found violation as a result here? https://nmcourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Findings-and...
Genuinely curious and interested in learning!
It's a very good point. The further upon appeal Meta goes, the more removed they get from a jury and they'll be more likely to get a favorable ruling due to the company's negative approval rating amongst the public
It's not a jury verdict. Crazy how much that needs to be repeated in this thread.
A jury is involved in the process. If the jury doesn't find violations, the judge can't assign penalties for those violations.
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
No one reads the article anymore. They're just vibe commenting.
Presumably it’s also easier to influence judges than random jurors.
"gets" is certainly a word choice. There is about a 0% chance NM get's anywhere near $25 billion
"New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion."
I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.
They got an outlandish $25B in their local kangaroo court. It'll be appealed and hopefully reduced.
What makes it outlandish?
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
[1] https://verdictwiki.com/landmark-cases/
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
OK fine, it's about deterrence. Explain why are trying 100x more vigorously to deter the category 'advertising-based infractions' (which the majority of the 'victims' still don't even know happened, let alone experience any pain and suffering from) than 'negligently giving people cancer and killing them'?
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
I'm trying to puzzle together the belief system that makes your comment coherent.
You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?
Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?
Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.
Yeah because government steals two breads from you if you get caught stealing a bread
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
It's $11,737 per current resident of New Mexico by my math. So, 20+ offenses per resident of the state? Of course, many people weren't even Facebook users, so it must be even more offenses per user.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
You could sue Facebook for $25 trillion and a local jury would unanimously vote yes. These numbers don’t mean anything. This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney. You think they'd have trouble finding 12 jurors in Santa Fe, NM who dislike big tech? It is always shut down or massively reduced by a higher court.
That's not what happened here though. The penalties were defined by law, the jurors applied them. The judge already reduced most of the penalty. So... what about this case is outlandish?
All such "let's multiply one large number with another large number followed by a third large number to come up with hundreds of billions in penalities" calculations never hold up in appeals. Otherwise if the logic was sound and there were actually 43 million violations then why was it reduced from $219.5 billion to $25 billion in the first place? Like I said everyone is making up numbers, and the appeals court will make up another one.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
I don't know why the judge reduced the penalty as the article didn't state that. I don't really have anything to go on other than you saying everyone is just making up numbers. I don't find that argument convincing given my experience with the courts.
>This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney.
Yeah maybe in movies
It already was. According to NM law, the sum of fines for the 43 million violations Facebook committed against New Mexico would have been $219B, but the judge was feeling kind that day.
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
No. $219B is the absolute maximum theoretical fine assessable at $5000/violation x 43 million counts. The $25B number is still ridiculous. Either the number of counts is too high (seems likely at 20x the population of NM) or the assessment per count is too high, but regardless, they need to arrive at a lower number.
Ah, so again a solution was found which continues to allow future crimes to be planned like a business case with basic cost/benefit math.
Why wasn't this prosecuted with jail-sentences like Dieselgate?
$25B penalty that’s like a month of their revenue. This is like me paying a month’s salary as penalty - it’s not pleasant but it would definitely not impact my life style.
I agree with the rest of this super well-informed thread that we need to remove corporate limited liability so we can send executives who break the law like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes to prison. It's so wrong that we can't send these people to prison when they break the law!
This is incredibly almost $12,000 per New Mexican resident. I wonder how much they will actually pocket after attorney's fees and appeals?
If this is out of the NM AG, they're probably using house attorneys -- no fees. It is likely to be appealed and reduced in appeal.
The AG was in charge of the prosecution of the case but they wisely didn't handle it all by themselves. New Mexico was represented in court by DiCello Levitt LLP and McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Each probably stand to make billions if the award is upheld.
https://dicellolevitt.com/new-mexico-secures-resounding-jury...
Looks like Zuck having a HARD time taking accountability for any of the eventual social _consequences_ of his social _network_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE
best quote by Sheryl Sandberg:
"[FB] is given data by it's users, rather than us collecting it."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4&t=262s
This is not a slap but a lick on the wrist.
> “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 in the statement.
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?
Q3 earnings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187025
Obama was allowed to collect just as much private information during his campaign. The tech community called him a 'genius'.
Hillary used Cambridge Analytica in almost the same way (this is where the Trumo campaign got the idea).
When the Democrats can get away with literal murder in many cases, I stop taking outrage like this seriously.
If Democrats in power are just going to break the law, why should I follow it?
>When the Democrats can get away with literal murder in many cases...
>If Democrats in power are just going to break the law...
Citation? And do you think that one person breaking the law absolves someone else?
They will appeal, as usual, and never pay that.
People are not notifying this nearly enough, but Meta is still going up and at it in Brazil [1] during one of the most polarized elections I've ever seen during my time.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
The book Careless People paints a picture of Zuck & Co that should cause anyone to hesitate to touch any of their products. It's a shame so much of the world runs on WhatsApp. It's a bigger shame that they were ever allowed to acquire WhatsApp in the first place.
Thanks for continuing to talk about this. It's ridiculous how much the US meddles in the elections of others and acts all :surprised-pikachu: when Russia sorta kinda meddles a bit in ONE election of their own.
The Bolsanaro family is ofc a close ally of Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/21/battle-meta-al...
We even have Meta employees calling the meddling out: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/16/meta-employees-...
This will be successfully appealed. It is an outrageous verdict for something with zero actual harms.
Woah, I remember hearing about the Cambridge Analytica stuff for the first time in 2020 from watching "The Social Dilemma". I'm surprised there is still legal fall out from that. Also 15% interest until the fine is paid in full is wild. Wonder where they are going to get the cash given how much has been going to AI.
Not enough.
Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.
America fines their companies left and right but won't allow other countries to do for the same wrongdoings.
Its very easy to understand the motives but other countries lack back bone to ban these companies
Other countries fine American companies all the time.
They were originally sued for, what, half a trillion?
Pennies on the dollar.
cost of doing business
New Mexico DOJ release: https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of...
If they actually pay $25B, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I might even eat two of my hats
How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.
$0. for better or worse, they have ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. I don't think NM would/could expect to get any money from a penalty. I may misunderstand how penalties and bankruptcy work, but I would expect it's been a better use of time to try to get $$$ from Meta than a defunct entity.
How much is a bankrupt non-existent company going to pay? You tell me..
Diseconomies of scale.
Jury based punitive damages are constantly overturned because they are not legal experts and don't understand anything.
Anyone who thinks Meta will actually pay this amount have no clue what they're talking about.
The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.
They are also not punitive damages, and Meta was also found to be willful.
> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Otherwise it's just cost of business.
Are you proposing that as part of this settlement, Meta should have to delete the posts and likes and facebook accounts of users in New Mexico?
Not necessarily the accounts or posts. They can be made to delete all the profiling data that they've collected over the years and be barred from inferring anything from user submitted past data and new data for a few years.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
That would unironically dramatically improve the world. Knock out Florida and Texas next please!
They will likely not even have to pay $25B bc they will continue to appeal till they get a more favorable ruling
> umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen. > > They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
If the data was not "stolen", then asking them to delete is also not "recovery".
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Yes? They used Facebook APIs in conjunction with their own data points. This is basically all of "ad tech."
Ad campaign? We are lucky they didn’t make the settlement in “Meta Quest Cash” or “Ad Buy Credit”
They absolutely tried at one point or another.
> Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
True, and considering the gravity of this situation, you'd think they're would've been more legal consequences for FB/Meta
I see similar dynamics happening on X, where it is just being used to spread hate and division.
Perhaps it's high time we had an international criminal justice system for social media companies.
There are much worse scandals internal to meta that get ignored because 8200.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
Yeah it is kind of sad how not stopping posts which fueled a literal genocide is hardly glanced at but Cambridge Analytica is considered a disaster of the highest order. Who died from Cambridge Analytica?
The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.
i hate that zuck has his ad empire funding all sort of stupid shit. Nothing can even touch him as long as ad dollars keep flowing.
why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform. i hate it so much.
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
> the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death
They don't mind; it's a targeted market fit. They have Instagram and WhatsApp for other demographics.
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others. The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)
> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform
Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.
no i dont
So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?
It’s crazy how these criminals can get away with it just by paying money. Sure, $25B isn’t peanuts, but this money shouldn’t have belonged to companies like Meta to begin with.
Another example why Third party Advertising needs to be banned and also put on the list of human rights by the UN.
The inbalance between good and bad consequences from third party advertising is just completely broken.
We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
$25 billion is not nothing to Meta or to anybody
If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.
I support the death penalty for corporations.
We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
I support the licensure of boards of directors and CEO types, and enforcement of laws against the people who control companies.
If the CFO commits a crime, they can't get a license anymore. Start getting the bad actors out of positions of power.
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
'capitalist punishment'
But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.
Change the law, it just that easy.
The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.
How exactly are you paying a "tax" because of this lawsuit?
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
Because Meta will pay nothing and the cost of the court and legal team, will be paid for by citizens.
That's because 47% of the Senate are attorneys/former practicing attorneys. Need more ex-Scientists in office. :)
No one is stopping them. There's no requirement that you be a lawyer. And lol, what a crazy idea... a lawmaker studying lawyering?! What a scam!
Just pointing out that congress has a lot of attorneys, and the OP was complaining about all the pro-attorney legislation.
Don't know why you think there's not correlation.
Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
Other countries don't have this problem
Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.
Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to. (ie. it's hyperbole, meaning "the US relies heavily on torts to enforce consumer privacy compared to other countries")
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
So basically the state of New Mexico is taking $25B from Meta's market cap, therefore whomever invested in META; and where will this money go here?
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.
Hey now, this will give NM plenty of money to spend on 55 mph speed signs and Santa Fe.
Don't invest in companies that do crimes.