By Diana Novak Jones
Sept 25 (Reuters) – A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found on Friday that Meta Platforms misled the state’s residents, in a case stemming from allegations that political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which had worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.
The verdict followed a two-week trial over a lawsuit filed by New Mexico’s attorney general in 2021, three years after news reports revealed that personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users had been harvested through a third-party app and used in efforts to profile voters.
The lawsuit accused the company of making statements that misled New Mexicans about how their personal information would be shared with third parties; how it handled hate speech and misinformation on the platform; and whether it gave some users preference in how it applies its policies.
Facebook did not tell consumers it was selling their data to outsiders, and it allowed hate speech or misinformation from users to be shared on the platform when it helped the company’s bottom line, attorneys for the state said.
Following the verdict, Judge Francis Mathew will determine how much in monetary penalties Meta must pay for the violations found by the jury.
The state’s lawsuit focused on specific statements, including comments made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg or in company blog posts, that New Mexico said made people believe they had control over the personal information they shared on the site, or that the site had blanket policies for how it dealt with hate speech or misinformation. In reality, Meta was selling the data to third-party apps, like the one that Cambridge Analytica relied on, and had exceptions to its policies for certain users, the state said.
Attorneys for Meta had argued at trial that the allegedly misleading statements were cherry-picked snippets that ignored critical context from the same statements, in which the company had repeatedly acknowledged its handling of misinformation or privacy issues was not perfect. The company is constantly improving and does not benefit from harmful content being shared on its platform, they said.
Meta also denied that it sells users’ information.
Reuters viewed the trial on Courtroom View Network.
The verdict marks the second time in six months a jury in Santa Fe has weighed a lawsuit brought by the state of New Mexico against Meta Platforms.
In the first trial, which ended in March, a Santa Fe jury found Meta misled users about young users’ safety on its Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms and ordered the company to pay $375 million in civil penalties. After a second phase of that trial, a judge directed the company to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and ordered Meta to implement measures to protect teen Facebook and Instagram users in New Mexico.
A few weeks after the judge’s ruling, Meta reached a sweeping settlement with 47 US states, Washington, D.C., and US territories, agreeing to pay a maximum of about $16.7 billion to resolve claims that it designed Facebook and Instagram to addict young children. As part of that deal, it agreed to pay a handful of states that had sued the company over privacy violations related to Cambridge Analytica $459 million to resolve those cases.
New Mexico was not part of the settlement, so its case over Cambridge Analytica moved forward to trial.
Meta and other social media companies have faced increasing scrutiny from legislators and in the courts over the impact their platforms have on users.
The companies face thousands of lawsuits in federal and state courts by individuals, school districts, municipalities and other government entities claiming they sought to addict children and caused a mental health crisis including harms such as anxiety, depression and suicide.
Trials are set for October and February in the cases over teen harms.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Nia Williams)
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