$Meta Platforms(META.US) was just ordered to pay $25 billion in what New Mexico's attorney general calls possibly the la…

$Meta Platforms(META.US) was just ordered to pay $25 billion in what New Mexico's attorney general calls possibly the largest state verdict against a company in American history

A Santa Fe judge set the penalty today in the state's Cambridge Analytica privacy case, per CNBC and AP. A jury found in September that $Meta Platforms(META.US) misled users about data privacy and content moderation

The jury counted more than 43 million violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act, at up to $5,000 each. That put the theoretical maximum at $219.5 billion

New Mexico asked for $35 to $40 billion. $Meta Platforms(META.US) argued it should pay no more than $3.45 billion, per Reuters

For scale, the record $5 billion FTC privacy penalty in 2019 is a fifth of this. $Meta Platforms(META.US) is expected to appeal

The stock is still up about 2% today ahead of earnings after the close tonight. Wall Street is treating $25 billion as a cost of doing business for a company this size. The bigger risk is the precedent, because per-violation state laws just turned a decade-old scandal into a bill five times the size of that FTC fine

Source: StockMarket.News