A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion after a jury found the company liable last month for deceiving users about Facebook’s data privacy and content moderation policies.
The judgment by state judge Francis Mathew capped a yearslong legal battle waged by the state, which first sued in 2021 over alleged violations of its Unfair Practices Act in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The jury found that Meta had violated the law nearly 44 million times — including through how it depicted its efforts in protecting users’ privacy and how it combated misinformation and hate speech across Facebook.
Why the Penalty Is So Massive
The sheer count of violations drove the figure into the billions: each of the nearly 44 million individual violations added to the tally. For context, even the record-breaking settlements Meta has paid at the federal level — like the FTC’s $5 billion penalty in 2019 — look small next to this state-level judgment.
The case centered on whether Meta honestly portrayed its privacy protections and moderation practices to users, or whether it systematically misled the public about what was happening with their data after Cambridge Analytica exposed how Facebook user data was harvested for political targeting.
What’s Next
Judgments this size almost never stick on the first try — Meta is widely expected to appeal, and state-level mega-verdicts frequently get reduced or tossed in appellate courts. But the headline number itself is the point: New Mexico’s verdict signals how aggressively states are willing to punish Big Tech over data practices, years after Cambridge Analytica faded from the news cycle. Whether the $25 billion survives appeal, the message to the industry is already delivered.
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Source: Variety — read the full story there.
