New Mexico court fines Meta $25 billion over user data privacy

A New Mexico state court has ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion penalty in a case over violations of user data privacy, including the Cambridge Analytica data leak a decade ago, CNBC reported, citing court documents.

The jury verdict and the reduced sum

In September a jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable for misleading state residents about how the company protects and collects user data and how it prevents harmful content from spreading on its platforms. The jury concluded that Meta committed more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law, each carrying a penalty of up to $5,000.

The initial penalty reached $219.5 billion, but Judge Francis Mathew reduced it to $25 billion. Interest will accrue on that amount at 15% a year until it is paid in full.

"The extraordinary number of knowing violations found by the jury, the duration and systematic nature of such conduct, the breadth of the subject matter, the involvement of Facebook's senior leadership, the size of the New Mexico audience reached, and the clearly deliberate and systematic character of repeated false statements by Facebook... justify applying the maximum level of penalty," the judge wrote.

The ruling says the company failed to carry out the comprehensive internal investigation it had promised, and calls the review "knowingly ineffective" because of pressure from management.

Reactions

"For too long, powerful tech companies have acted as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law. This ruling shows such violations have real consequences," said New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez.

Meta's chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticised the verdict and said he was confident of winning on appeal. "This ruling, like the attorney general's approach to enforcement, makes doing business in New Mexico practically impossible," he said.

Background

In March 2018 it emerged that the British firm Cambridge Analytica had used a quiz app to collect, without their direct consent, the personal profiles of more than 87 million Facebook users and used them for targeted political advertising during Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Brexit referendum. In summer 2019 the US Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook a record $5 billion over privacy violations, and in late 2022 Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a federal class action in the Cambridge Analytica case.

In March 2026 a New Mexico court found Meta liable in a case over its platform algorithms and child safety online and ordered it to pay $375 million, to which the judge later added an obligation to put another $567 million into a special harm-remediation fund. In August 2026 Meta reached a $17 billion settlement with attorneys general of 47 states, the District of Columbia and territories, ending litigation over claims that Facebook and Instagram addict children; the company did not formally admit wrongdoing.

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