Key takeaways: A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found Facebook misled users about data privacy. The judge called the deception systematic and long-running; Meta says it will appeal.
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state on Wednesday, after a jury found the company had misled Facebook users about the privacy of their personal data. The penalty is one of the largest ever imposed on a US corporation, and the latest courtroom defeat tied to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal.
State District Court Judge Francis Mathew set the figure in a penalty decision that followed a jury verdict in September. The jury had found more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. Under state law, penalties can reach $5,000 per violation — enough, the judge wrote, to justify a figure of more than $219 billion. He reduced the award to $25 billion.
The case was brought in 2021 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who could access their data, how the company handled hate speech and misinformation, and its other internal policies. Prosecutors argued the company knew third parties had broad access to users’ personal information — and that it tolerated hate speech and other harmful content when doing so served its bottom line.
The lawsuit traces back to Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct British political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The firm obtained personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party personality quiz app, then used the information to build voter profiles for targeted political advertising.
In his order, Mathew wrote that “Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”
Meta said it would appeal. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company was confident it would prevail, arguing the state’s approach “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.” Torrez called the penalty one of the largest single-state verdicts against a corporation in US history, and noted that fines collected under the consumer protection law help fund public education.
The ruling dwarfs the $5 billion penalty the US Federal Trade Commission imposed on Meta in 2019 over the same scandal. It signals that state regulators are willing to pursue fines on a scale designed to hurt even the world’s largest technology companies — and that the Cambridge Analytica fallout is still spreading, nearly a decade after the data was harvested.
An appeal is near certain, and the process could take years. If the penalty survives, it would stand as one of the largest fines in US legal history — and an invitation to other states still pursuing their own privacy cases to aim just as high.
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