A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a sum the state attorney general's office describes as one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on a corporation in the United States. The ruling follows a September jury verdict finding that Meta misled consumers about how it protected their data and about its efforts to prevent misinformation and hate speech on its platforms.
The case grew out of a 2021 complaint filed in the wake of revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consultancy, harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to identify messages likely to resonate with voters ahead of President Donald Trump's first election. The jury found an extraordinary number of willful violations, and the judge cited the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects involved, and the participation of senior Facebook leadership in justifying the maximum penalty allowed under the law.
That maximum, $5,000 per violation, produced a total of more than $219 billion in civil penalties before the judge reduced the figure to $25 billion. Even the reduced amount dwarfs other recent rulings and settlements involving Meta. In a separate New Mexico state court ruling, Meta was ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in civil penalties and abatement for misleading the public about the safety of its products, and the company reached a settlement with most other state attorneys general over kids online safety complaints for $17.1 billion, with $5.3 billion of that contingent on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar measures.
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the ruling and the attorney general's enforcement approach make it all but impossible to do business in New Mexico. He characterized the lawsuit as an attempt to tax speech in order to enforce new rules on what people can say online, and said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the case was never about a single company or a single scandal. He framed it as a question of whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences, and said the state took the case to trial and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of New Mexico law.
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