Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion to New Mexico in Cambridge Analytica Privacy Case

A judge in New Mexico on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion to the state, after a jury found the company had misled Facebook users about how their personal data was handled. State District Judge Francis Mathew set the penalty on Oct. 21, 2026. It is one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a technology company in the United States, and it grows out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal that first surfaced in 2018.

How the number was built

A jury found in September that Meta had committed more than 43 million violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act. Each violation carries a penalty of up to $5,000. In his order, Mathew wrote that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted under the law, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion. State lawyers had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion.

"Facebook's wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Mathew wrote in the order.

A case rooted in Cambridge Analytica

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in 2021. The case followed reports in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, had obtained personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. The firm used the data to build profiles of American voters.

The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data. It also said the company misled users about how it handles hate speech and misinformation. According to the state, Meta knew third parties had broad access to users' personal data, and it tolerated harmful content when that benefited the company's bottom line.

Torrez calls it a warning, Meta promises an appeal

Torrez said the ruling should serve as a warning to the industry. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," he said in a statement. "This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal. It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences."

Money from consumer protection penalties in New Mexico funds state education. At a press conference, Torrez said the state may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years.

Meta said it will appeal. "This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer, said in a statement. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

A long line of privacy penalties

The New Mexico order is the largest in a series of penalties tied to Cambridge Analytica. In July 2019 the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion for violating consumers' privacy. In December 2022 Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit over data access.

The ruling landed on a busy day for the company. Meta reported its third quarter earnings after the market closed, hours after the order.