New Mexico court orders Meta to pay a record $25 billion penalty tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal

The penalty is the largest ever against Meta. A New Mexico court ordered the company on Wednesday to pay $25 billion in a data privacy case tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The penalty was originally calculated at approximately $219 billion. Judge Francis Mathew reduced it. A jury in a Santa Fe courthouse found Meta liable in September for misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from flourishing on its services. The jury concluded Meta had over 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, each carrying a maximum civil penalty of $5,000. A New Mexico judge was responsible for determining the ultimate fine. Interest on the penalty accrues at 15% per year until the fine is paid in full.

Judge found lies at the heart of Meta’s business

The trial lasted two weeks. It found Meta had for years intentionally lied to the public about how it handled and controlled Facebook user data. Judge Mathew said the lies extended beyond Facebook’s data practices and went to the heart of its core business practices. Communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were found to be misleading and designed to mislead the public. Mathew said Facebook did not conduct the full investigation it promised following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. The judge attributed the failure to pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations. All of these factors contributed to what the judge characterized in the filing as a willfully ineffective internal examination by Facebook. “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 Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act - $5,000 per violation found by the jury,” Mathew wrote.

Years of litigation over Cambridge Analytica

The Cambridge Analytica scandal kicked off in 2018. It focused on allegations that the political consulting firm improperly accessed information of 87 million users, raising questions about Facebook’s data handling practices and rocking the Mark Zuckerberg-led company before its official name change to Meta. Former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas originally filed the state’s Cambridge Analytica-related lawsuit in 2021. Current AG Raúl Torrez oversaw the related trial. In 2022, Meta agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that also sprang from the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meta previously resolved various Cambridge Analytica-derived data privacy lawsuits across the nation as part of an August settlement of nearly $17 billion with a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case related to child safety and mental health. New Mexico was not part of that August settlement. Its case proceeded to trial.

New Mexico’s broader push against Meta

Torrez also led a separate child-safety trial against Meta. A March jury ruled the social media company should pay $375 million for violating the state’s unfair practices act. A New Mexico judge later ordered Meta to pay $567 million into an abatement fund in a second phase of the case that determined the social media firm’s actions created a public nuisance. Meta said it disagreed with that ruling. The company planned to appeal. Separately, Meta reached an $18 billion deal with California this year. Meta has either been fined or agreed to settle several other lawsuits this year. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.