A New Mexico district court judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties following a legal battle over the company's handling of user data. The ruling stems from a case linked to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where it was revealed that the political consulting firm improperly accessed the personal information of millions of Facebook users. The court's decision follows a September jury verdict in Santa Fe, which found Meta liable for misleading state citizens regarding how the platform safeguards and collects user data, as well as its efforts to prevent harmful information from spreading on its services.
The image represents the state agency that successfully litigated the $25 billion penalty against Meta.
The financial penalty was calculated based on a staggering number of violations. A jury determined that Meta committed 43,899,725 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act. Under this law, each transgression carries a civil penalty of up to $5,000. While the initial calculation based on these violations reached $219.5 billion, the judge reduced the final award to $25 billion. The court noted that the high penalty was justified by the "extraordinary number of willful violations," the duration of the conduct, the involvement of senior leadership, and the systematic nature of the company's repeated misstatements. Additionally, the judge ruled that interest on the penalty will accrue at a rate of 15% annually until the debt is paid in full.
Meta has criticized the ruling, with its chief legal officer stating that the company is confident it will prevail on appeal. The company argued that the Attorney General's approach makes it nearly impossible to do business in New Mexico and characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to impose a "tax on speech." This case is distinct from a broader $17 billion settlement Meta reached with a coalition of 52 states and territories over child safety and mental health, as New Mexico chose to pursue its independent data privacy claims through trial rather than joining the multi-state agreement. The litigation also highlighted internal friction, with the court finding that Meta's internal investigations into the scandal were "willfully ineffective" due to executive pressure to keep costs down and a desire to avoid setting legal precedents.