A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found that the company misled users about its data-privacy practices in a case connected to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The penalty is among the largest imposed on the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and adds to the company’s widening legal exposure over privacy, platform safety and consumer protection.
New Mexico filed its lawsuit in 2021, alleging that Meta’s public statements did not accurately represent how Facebook handled personal data. Following a two-week trial, a jury in Santa Fe found that the company had committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer-protection laws. Each violation carried a potential penalty of as much as $5,000.
Judge Francis J. Mathew of the State District Court in Santa Fe issued the $25 billion order. Meta had not provided an immediate public response when the judgment was reported.
The litigation stems from disclosures that Cambridge Analytica obtained information belonging to tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge. The political consulting company used data to create profiles of voters, setting off investigations into Facebook’s data-collection practices and its controls over third-party access. The controversy resulted in Mark Zuckerberg appearing before the US Congress and became a defining event in the global debate over platform accountability.
The latest order follows other adverse decisions involving Meta in New Mexico. In August, a judge ordered the company to pay $567 million in damages after a jury found that its platforms had enabled harm to younger users. That amount came in addition to a $375 million penalty in the same case in March.
Meta also reached a settlement in August with 47 US states, the District of Columbia and US territories. The settlement provides for payments of as much as $17.1 billion and requires product changes connected to allegations that Facebook and Instagram exposed children to addictive platform features. A further $459 million of that settlement addressed related Cambridge Analytica privacy claims.
The New Mexico judgment places renewed attention on consumer-protection statutes as a route for pursuing technology companies over their representations to users, particularly where conventional platform-liability protections may not apply.
