Facebook-parent company Meta sentenced to billions in New Mexico

Meta is sentenced to billions in New Mexico It is a punishment of historic scope for the parent company of Facebook: Meta must pay 25 billion dollars for the data privacy scandal involving Cambridge Analytica. The court refers to the extent of the legal violations. (dpa) / lma. San Francisco - The Facebook corporation Meta is to pay a fine of 25 billion dollars for the data privacy scandal with Cambridge Analytica from a year ago. This was decided by a federal court in the state of New Mexico on Wednesday. Previously, the jurors had found that users were misled regarding data privacy and freedom of speech on Facebook. The judge calculated a penalty of almost 219.5 billion dollars in his decision – then reduced it to 25 billion in the same sentence. Meta initially made no reaction to the decision. However, CEO Mark Zuckerberg will present the quarterly figures in a phone call with investors on Wednesday and may then comment on the verdict. Since the jurors had already found Meta guilty of the allegations some weeks earlier, the corporation had already emphasized that it disagreed with the decision and would continue to defend itself against the accusations. The record amount of 25 billion dollars is explained by the fact that the court had assessed a fine of up to 5000 dollars per violation. The jurors found millions of violations. A Scandal with Consequences The Cambridge Analytica scandal damaged public trust in the Facebook corporation in 2018. It was about information from a seemingly harmless survey of a data researcher being used to create user profiles and shared with the analysis firm Cambridge Analytica. The team of then-candidate Donald Trump also resorted to this before the American presidential election in 2016. A total of around 87 million user accounts were affected. The corporation paid around six billion dollars to the American government, among other things, to stop investigations. Following the scandal, New Mexico then brought the case to court in 2021 with allegations that also concerned freedom of speech on the platform. The trigger was revelations during the review of the case. Among other things, a whistleblower report stated that some prominent accounts had been secretly exempted from rules on what content was allowed on the platform.