Meta Hit With $25B New Mexico Privacy Penalty
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found it misled users on privacy in the Cambridge Analytica case. Meta says it will appeal.
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state after a jury found the company misled Facebook users about their privacy. The ruling, handed down on Wednesday, is one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a tech company in the United States.
A record-setting penalty
State District Court Judge Francis Mathew set the $25 billion figure after jurors ruled in September that Meta had violated New Mexico's consumer protection laws more than 43 million times. Under state law, each violation can carry a penalty of up to $5,000. The judge wrote that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted based on the law, but reduced the figure to $25 billion. The state's lawyers had asked for between $35 billion and $40 billion, while Meta's lawyers argued the company should pay no more than $3.4 billion. The money will go into a state fund for education, according to the attorney general's office. The ruling landed on the same day Meta reported its quarterly earnings.
What the jury found
The case dates back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. In 2018, Meta (then Facebook) disclosed that a political consulting firm had improperly obtained the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party personality quiz app. The firm then used that data to build profiles of American voters for the 2016 presidential campaign. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in 2021, accusing the company of deceiving users about who could access their data and about how it handled hate speech and misinformation. The state said Meta knew that third parties had broad access to user data but told users otherwise. In his ruling, Judge Mathew described Meta's statements as "a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public" and wrote that the misrepresentations were "a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model." "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," Torrez said in a statement.
How Meta responded
Meta said it will appeal the decision. Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the ruling "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico" and called the lawsuit an attempt "to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." "We are confident we will prevail on appeal," Mahoney said. The company argued that the state failed to prove its privacy statements harmed New Mexicans.
What comes next
Interest on the penalty will accrue during an appeal, though the number of violations Meta was charged with could be reduced. The outcome may also renew attention on the settlements Meta already reached over the same scandal: a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 and a $725 million class-action settlement in 2022. New Mexico was one of the few states that chose to take its case to trial instead of settling.
Sources
Reuters - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-ordered-pay-25-billion-new-mexico-after-jury-finds-company-misled-consumers-2026-10-21/ CNN - https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/21/tech/meta-25-billion-new-mexico-judgment?cid=external-feeds_iluminar_meta USA Today - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/10/21/meta-fined-25-billion-in-new-mexico-privacy-lawsuit/92367324007/ Barron's - https://www.barrons.com/articles/meta-hit-with-25-billion-privacy-penalty-reigniting-trust-concerns-c55b29c6 The Times - https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/meta-fine-new-mexico-25-billion-cv8hwvw5b Economic Times - https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/meta-ordered-to-pay-new-mexico-25-billion-after-jury-finds-it-deceived-facebook-users-about-privacy/articleshow/135097554.cms