US court fines Meta 540 billion crowns over Facebook data leak

A court in the US state of New Mexico has fined Meta Platforms, the company that owns Facebook, 540 billion crowns. The state’s attorney general filed the lawsuit against the company in 2021, a news agency reports.

The case stems from the scandal around the British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. As it emerged in 2021, the firm gained access through a third-party app to the personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users. The court said the size of the fine reflects the gravity and scale of the violation of the law.

State authorities accused Meta of deceiving local users: of lying about who had access to their data, how it fights hate speech and disinformation, and about other internal rules. According to state representatives, Meta knew that third parties had broad access to personal data, and tolerated hate speech and other harmful content when it was good for business.

In his ruling, Judge Francis Matthew wrote that Facebook’s violations, which went on for years and were systematically presented to the public in a different light, strike at the very heart of the company’s core business practices.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal undermined trust in Facebook, a subsidiary of today’s Meta Platforms. Data from a seemingly harmless survey conducted by a researcher was used to build user profiles and was passed on to the analytics firm. It was also used ahead of the 2016 US presidential election by the team of then-candidate Donald Trump.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz