New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay $25 billion over Cambridge Analytica

Meta hit with a $25 billion penalty

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to The Verge. The sum covers more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's unfair practices law, and it represents the biggest legal blow the company has absorbed this year — a year that has already brought Meta several other defeats and settlements.

How the court reached the figure

The case grew out of a complaint filed in 2021, after revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a UK political consultancy, had harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts in order to craft messages that would resonate with voters ahead of Donald Trump's first presidential election. In September, a New Mexico jury found that Meta misled consumers both about how it protected their data and about its efforts to curb misinformation and hate speech on its platforms.

In setting the penalty, the judge weighed what the court described as an "extraordinary number of willful violations" found by the jury, along with the duration and repetition of the conduct, the range of subjects it touched, and the involvement of senior Facebook leadership. Those factors justified the maximum allowed under the law: $5,000 per violation. Stacked across more than 43 million violations, that formula would have produced a total exceeding $219 billion, which the judge reduced to $25 billion.

The Verge reports that Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The latest in a string of losses

Even at the reduced amount, the penalty is "one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history," according to the New Mexico Attorney General's office, and it dwarfs Meta's other recent legal outcomes. The Verge points to two notable comparisons: 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 in a multi-state agreement over kids' online safety complaints, Meta settled with most other attorneys general for $17.1 billion — though $5.3 billion of that depends on YouTube and TikTok adopting similar measures.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, whose office has now notched a series of wins against the company, framed the verdict in expansive terms. "This case has always been about more than one company or one scandal," Torrez said in a statement quoted by The Verge. "It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences."

He added that New Mexico "stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law." Even so, the financial results have not fully translated into operational change: The Verge notes that Meta successfully fought off many of the business reforms Torrez sought in the remedies phase of the separate online safety case.

Why it matters

The Cambridge Analytica affair first came to light years ago, but this ruling shows its legal fallout is still compounding — and at a scale few privacy cases have ever reached. A $25 billion penalty, cut down from a theoretical maximum above $219 billion, demonstrates that state-level consumer protection laws can now produce consequences on par with major federal actions. For Meta, it adds to a rapidly mounting legal bill across multiple fronts. For the wider industry, it is a warning that misrepresenting data practices to users can carry a price measured in the tens of billions — though whether record penalties alone will change how platforms actually behave remains the open question.