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Meta was ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy case that stemmed from the company's Cambridge Analytica scandal from nearly a decade ago. The penalty, revealed in a court filing, comes after a jury in a Santa Fe courthouse found in September the social media giant liable for misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from flourishing on its services. 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. The Wednesday filing showed that the state was awarded $219.5 billion, but the penalty was ultimately reduced to $25 billion. "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. The judge added that interest on the penalty shall accrue at the rate of 15% each year until the fine is paid off in full. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez in a statement. He added that "this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences." Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the penalty, saying in a statement that the company is "confident" that it will "prevail on appeal." "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. "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. But because New Mexico was not part of the settlement, the state's data privacy case that arose from Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal proceeded to trial in September. 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. That scandal rocked the Mark Zuckerberg-led company before its official name change to Meta, and focused on allegations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the information of 87 million users, raising questions about Facebook's data handling practices. Mathew said in the filing that "Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised" following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. "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. Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas originally filed the state's Cambridge Analytica-related lawsuit in 2021, while current AG Torrez oversaw the related trial. Torrez also led his state's child safety-related trial against Meta that resulted in a March jury ruling that the social media company should pay $375 million for violating the state's unfair practices act. A New Mexico judge would later order Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund as part of a second phase of the case that determined the social media firm's actions created a public nuisance. Meta said it disagreed with that New Mexico ruling and planned to appeal. WATCH: AI oversight is the topic of discourse in Washington.
document fetched 2026-10-29 09:03 · canonical https://cnbc.com/2026/10/21/meta-new-mexico-cambridge-analytica-penalty.html