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Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion Over Cambridge Analytica Privacy Violations
· Confirmed
In Short: Judge Francis Mathew of New Mexico District Court found that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices act, with each violation carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
A New Mexico court ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay $25 billion in penalties on Wednesday, stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal that began in 2018.
The scandal involved the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessing the information of 87 million Facebook users, raising questions about Facebook's data handling practices.
The judge directed Meta to pay $25 billion, a significant reduction from the initial $219.5 billion proposed by the jury.
New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez said the penalty shows that big tech companies will face consequences for violations.
The case was brought after 48 other states signed a settlement for $18 billion in August, while New Mexico pursued a trial.
The jury found that Meta had over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws, and the judge ruled that Meta was responsible for these violations.
Meta's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, stated that the ruling makes it nearly impossible to do business in New Mexico.
The judge noted that Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation it promised following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.
The case highlights the ongoing scrutiny of tech companies' data privacy practices and the potential for significant penalties.
The $25 billion penalty is one of the largest state-level privacy judgments ever entered against a technology company.
What's confirmed
- "The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act - $5,000 per violation found by the jury," New Mexico District Court Judge Francis Mathew wrote in the filing.
- "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." Meta previously resolved various Cambridge Analytica-derived data privacy lawsuits across the nation as part of an overarching August settlement of nearly $17 billion with a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case related to child safety and mental health.
- Last month, a jury in Santa Fe found that Meta was liable for misleading citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data.
- New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez weighed in and said that the penalty shows that big tech companies who commit violations will receive consequences.
- The jury found that Meta had over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, according to CNBC.
- Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws when a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, harvested Facebook user data to generate targeted political ads for the 2016 election.
- A judge has ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for deceiving users about privacy and content moderation on Facebook.
- New Mexico's lawsuit argued that Facebook generally misled consumers about its data privacy practices, as well as its efforts to moderate misinformation and hate speech.
- Jurors in September found Meta liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws for making misleading public statements about how it handled users’ personal data.
- "This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," Mahoney said in the statement.
- “Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he said.
- The filing shows that New Mexico was awarded $219.5 billion, but the penalty was reduced to $25 billion.
What's still developing
- Although the jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000, a New Mexico judge was responsible for determining the ultimate fine.
- In 2022, the social media giant agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that also sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica scandal that kicked off in 2018.
- A New Mexico judge later directed Meta to contribute $567 million to an abatement fund, concluding that the company's conduct amounted to a public nuisance, according to CNBC.
- On Wednesday, a judge ordered the social media giant to initiate its biggest payout yet: $25 billion to the state of New Mexico for the tech giant’s role in deceiving resident users over its data privacy practices, The New York Times reports.
- The case stemmed from a 2021 complaint in the wake of the revelations a few years earlier that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to pinpoint messages that would resonate with voters leading up to President Donald Trump’s first election.
- Jurors spent weeks reviewing internal Meta communications, public statements, and testimony before reaching their verdict on September 25, 2026.
- The size of the number alone, $25 billion, is large enough to rank among the biggest corporate penalties in American history tied to consumer data practices, eclipsing Meta’s own $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019.
- To refresh your memory, the scandal involved Cambridge Analytica — a political firm financed in part by pro-Trump benefactors — harvesting private data from tens of millions of Facebook users, which was eventually conveyed to members of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and used for political targeting.
- "Pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations," all contributed to what the judge characterized as a "willfully ineffective" internal examination by Facebook, the filing said.
- “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” he said in a statement.