The company also failed to notify users when apps misused their data, only flagging two of 2,000 unique apps associated with data misuse, Mathew said. Following its investigation, Meta’s “decision was deliberately made to narrow Facebook’s internal definition of data misuse so that Facebook would not have to notify as many people due to the operational burden of doing so,” he wrote.
Additionally, Facebook continued knowingly profiting off of pages with misinformation and hate speech, Mathew wrote. Internal research found “substantial amounts of misleading, false, and possibly false political, health, and science content,” with Meta documenting a “greater concentration of false content in top performing advertising content than in top performing Facebook content.”
Rather than share that research, Meta buried it, while also deceiving users in dozens of other ways, including by misrepresenting that the average Facebook users gets “equal treatment” to celebrities and influencers. While Meta claimed everyone was treated the same, one class of users received warning to remove violating content before strikes were applied and frequently got harmful or sketchy content decisions overturned in cases where most users would not.
Hegde told AP News that she thinks as Meta and other company’s AI products grow more popular, it will be increasingly important for states to remain watchful and protect residents from unknown harms.
“Right now, they are rolling out Muse, an AI assistant encouraging people to trust it with everything from their bank accounts to their medical information,” Hegde said. “Which is why we need more enforcers with courage and laws with actual teeth to rein them in.”
Torrez vowed to keep watch in New Mexico and to continue using the blueprint from the Meta case to enforce consumer protection laws and prevent tech giants’ misuse of data.
“This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal,” Torrez said. “It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences. New Mexico stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law. This outcome reinforces a fundamental principle, companies that do business in our state must follow our laws and respect the rights of our people.”