Meta Hit With $25 Billion Fine in New Mexico Over Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal

Meta owes New Mexico $25 billion. That's the number a state court judge settled on Wednesday, closing out a data privacy case tied to the company's Cambridge Analytica scandal — a saga that started nearly a decade ago but is still generating some of the biggest legal bills in Meta's history.

The penalty traces back to a September jury verdict in a Santa Fe courthouse, where jurors found Meta liable for misleading New Mexico residents about how it collected and protected their data, and about its failure to stop harmful content from spreading on its platforms. The jury didn't stop at a general finding of liability. It counted more than 43 million separate violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act, and under that law, each violation can carry a civil penalty of up to $5,000.

Do the math on that and you get a staggering figure: the court filing shows the state was initially awarded $219.5 billion. But translating a jury's violation count into an actual dollar penalty is a judge's call, not a jury's, and New Mexico district court judge Francis Joseph Mathew brought that number down to $25 billion.

Even reduced, it's still the maximum rate allowed under the law. Mathew didn't pull punches in explaining why. In his filing, he pointed to the sheer scale of the violations, how long the conduct went on, how many different subjects it touched, and the fact that senior Facebook leadership was involved. He wrote that the record showed "the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements," which he said justified the top penalty available under the state's Unfair Practices Act, $5,000 per violation.

Why New Mexico went to trial alone

Most of the Cambridge Analytica-related legal fallout against Meta has already been resolved. In August, the company agreed to pay close to $17 billion to settle with a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case centered on child safety and mental health, wrapping up a wide swath of litigation in one shot.

New Mexico wasn't part of that deal. Its Cambridge Analytica case, filed back in 2021 by then-Attorney General Hector Balderas, kept moving on its own track, culminating in the September trial that current Attorney General Raúl Torrez oversaw.

The underlying scandal goes back to 2018 and predates the company's rebrand from Facebook to Meta. It centered on revelations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had improperly accessed data from 87 million Facebook users, triggering a wave of scrutiny over how the platform handled personal information. Meta already paid $725 million in 2022 to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from the same episode. The New Mexico penalty is on an entirely different scale, and it's not the state's only recent win against the company.

A pattern in New Mexico

Torrez has now led two major cases against Meta within the same year. Back in March, a jury in a separate New Mexico trial focused on child safety found Meta liable under the same Unfair Practices Act, resulting in a $375 million penalty. A second phase of that case went further: a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund after determining the company's conduct amounted to a public nuisance. Meta has said it disagrees with that ruling and intends to appeal.

Taken together, the two New Mexico cases show a state attorney general's office that's been unusually aggressive and unusually successful in using consumer protection law to go after Meta's data and safety practices, rather than relying on federal regulators or multistate settlements to do the work.

CNBC reported that it reached out to Meta for comment on the new $25 billion penalty order; the company's response wasn't included in the reporting. Given its track record, an appeal looks likely, but for now, New Mexico has secured a verdict that dwarfs every other Cambridge Analytica-related payout Meta has made to date, and it did it by going to trial rather than settling.