How Many Billions Would It Take to Hold Meta Accountable?

Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. $25 billion is a massive fine, the largest Meta has ever faced, but it still had us folks at WIRED wondering: Would Meta even feel the pain?

A quick recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by lying to Meta users about the way it handled their data. (Later, New Mexico’s attorney general also made claims against Meta’s content moderation policies.) In September, a jury ruled in favor of the state. Then came the multibillion-dollar penalty.

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”

Meta’s legal troubles have proliferated so much this year that it’s hard to keep track of them. Earlier this year in New Mexico, a jury ruled that the social media company should pay $375 million for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act. That trial was related to child safety. A second phase of the case resulted in Meta being ordered to pay $567 million.

Meanwhile, a Los Angeles County superior court found Meta—and Google-owned YouTube—liable for harming a user’s mental health with the addictive design features of their apps. The plaintiff, a young woman, was awarded $6 million; Meta is on the hook for the bulk of that payment. Then in August, Meta settled a landmark federal case brought against the company by the majority of US states. This suit, once again, centered on addictive features in its apps that were alleged to be harmful to kids. As part of that settlement, Meta will pay the states between $17 and $18 billion over 10 years.

Added up, that’s a lot of billions. And yet: It’s still just the cost of doing business for Meta. Reuters reports that in the most recent New Mexico trial, the state’s attorneys originally asked Judge Francis Mathew to award the state between $35 and $45 billion. That would’ve been significant for the state, but would that extra $20 billion have kneecapped Meta? Nope.

Even if Meta was forced to pay the total maximum fine of the New Mexico ruling—a whopping $219 billion, or $5,000 across 43 million violations, reduced by the judge to $25 billion—the company would have felt only a mild sting. As of writing, Meta is worth around $1.7 trillion. Its stock took a hit on Thursday, but that was due to a confluence of factors, like Meta’s earnings report on Wednesday, the company’s massive capital expenditures on AI, and AI stocks dragging overall.