Eight Years On, Cambridge Analytica Scandal Catches Up With Meta in Santa Fe

On Friday, a jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, found that Meta, formerly Facebook, misled the public in statements about the Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal and its policies on hate speech, violence and misinformation. Jurors found 26 of 29 public claims by Facebook and its executives willfully deceptive, including nine concerning its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Both Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were deposed ahead of the trial, and the state played the videos of the depositions for jurors during the trial, which started on Sept. 8. State attorney Randi McGinn questioned Zuckerberg largely about content moderation, including the company’s "cross-check" list that gave high-profile users such as politicians and celebrities special review. She queried Sandberg on the company's messaging on privacy, the app developer investigation it promised after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and its handling of hate speech and misinformation.

The jury relied on two figures to count violations, according to the verdict form. It assigned 2.1 million violations to each of 11 statements that appeared in major news outlets and 1,386,648 to each of 15 statements made through company channels, including its newsroom, executives' Facebook posts, earnings calls and a developer conference, for a total of 43,899,720. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that the larger figure roughly equals New Mexico's population and the smaller one reflects an estimate of the state's Facebook users in 2020.

Unlike the jury in the state's child safety case against Meta, which set the penalty at the $5,000 maximum per violation, this jury decided only liability and the count. State District Judge Francis Mathew will determine how much Meta pays, Source New Mexico reported. In the earlier case, District Judge Bryan Biedscheid's Aug. 6 judgment kept the jury's $375 million penalty for 75,000 violations and ordered Meta to pay an additional $567 million into a fund to address harms to the state's youth.

"We disagree with the verdict and will continue to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record," Meta spokesperson Alex Burgos said in an email to The Associated Press. "Meta's platforms are forums for free expression. We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community. This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users' information and giving them control over their data."

The verdict may leave a bad taste in the mouths of other state attorneys general, most of whom released Meta from future Cambridge Analytica claims for about $459 million, a provision tucked into the company's $17 billion child safety settlement in August. New Mexico wasn't part of that deal.

"Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier accused the other AGs of settling for peanuts," said Daphne Keller, director of platform regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology. "New Mexico's stunning jury ruling suggests he may be right."

The visualization below shows each question the jury answered alongside the statement at issue, who made it, the jury's findings and the violations assigned. Readers can filter by topic, speaker or finding, or search the statements.