A New Mexico state court has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties following a high-profile data privacy trial stemming from the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. The massive financial penalty, detailed in a court filing released on Wednesday, concludes a legal battle that originated from allegations that the social media giant misled users regarding how it collected, safeguarded, and moderated user data.
The judgment follows a September jury verdict in a Santa Fe courthouse that found the social media giant liable for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. Under the state statute, each individual transgression carried a potential civil penalty of up to $5,000. Although initial court filings indicated the state was awarded an astronomical sum of $219.5 billion based on the sheer volume of violations, the presiding judge ultimately reduced the final penalty to $25 billion.
New Mexico District Court Judge Francis Mathew outlined the reasoning behind the substantial fine in the Wednesday filing, pointing to the scope and intentional nature of the company’s actions. The judge cited the extraordinary number of willful violations, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of affected subjects, and the involvement of senior leadership. Additional factors included the size of the New Mexico audience reached and the systematic nature of repeated misstatements established during the trial record.
“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 leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act,” Judge Mathew wrote. The filing specified that interest on the penalty will accrue at an annual rate of 15% until the total fine is paid in full.
Unlike many other jurisdictions across the country, New Mexico chose not to participate in an overarching August settlement involving a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case focused on child safety and mental health. Because New Mexico declined that resolution, its independent data privacy lawsuit—originally filed in 2021 by former state Attorney General Hector Balderas and overseen through trial by current Attorney General Raúl Torrez—proceeded to a courtroom showdown.
The roots of the litigation stretch back nearly a decade to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that erupted in 2018, rocking the platform under founder Mark Zuckerberg before the company rebranded as Meta. That controversy centered on revelations that the political consulting firm had improperly harvested the personal information of 87 million users, severely damaging public trust in the company’s data handling protocols.
In the recent filing, Judge Mathew noted that internal examinations conducted by the company in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures fell short of official promises. According to the court documents, Facebook did not carry out the comprehensive investigation it pledged to undertake. The judge pointed to pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, a lack of adequate enforcement resources, insufficient investigative techniques, and a corporate desire to avoid establishing precedents for future investigations as key factors that rendered the internal review willfully ineffective.
The $25 billion penalty is the latest in a series of legal setbacks for the tech conglomerate in New Mexico courts under Attorney General Torrez. Earlier, Torrez led a child-safety related trial against Meta that resulted in a March jury ruling that the firm violated the state’s unfair practices act, leading to a subsequent judicial order requiring Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund to address public nuisance claims. Meta has consistently maintained its disagreement with those rulings and indicated plans to pursue appeals.
