New Mexico jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users over Cambridge Analytica

What the jury decided

A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has found Facebook liable for deceiving users about the privacy protections on its platform, according to CBS News. The Friday verdict capped a two-week trial and moves the case into a penalty phase: the judge will now decide what the company owes, and attorneys for the state are seeking the maximum fine of $5,000 per violation.

Jurors sided with prosecutors on two central points, CBS News reported. They found that Facebook gave a misleading account of its investigations into data brokers following the Cambridge Analytica revelations, producing more than 2 million violations. They also accepted the argument that the company's inadequate data protections touched New Mexico's entire population, which exceeds 2 million people.

The deception at the center of the case

The trial revisited the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which a third-party personality quiz on Facebook harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles. That information was sold to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used it to generate targeted advertising and whose clients included Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. The firm has since shut down.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez cast the verdict as historic, saying a jury of state residents had rejected the notion that Facebook could spend years behaving as though it stood above rules that bind everyone else. He framed the result as meaningful well beyond New Mexico, for any state working to make large technology companies answerable for their conduct.

Meta's response

Facebook's lawyers argued during closing arguments that the state's evidence was stale, noting that New Mexico had five years to assemble its case and identified only one additional instance of a data breach.

A Meta spokesperson told CBS News the company disagreed with the verdict and would continue defending itself against what it characterized as attempts to misrepresent its record. The spokesperson stressed that free speech questions featured prominently in the trial, arguing that the company holds a First Amendment right to run its platforms in the way it believes best serves its community — an argument that links protecting user information and giving people control over their data with prioritizing free expression.

The case that settlements couldn't close

New Mexico's lawsuit was the only state case tied to Cambridge Analytica to reach a jury, and it nearly never got there. According to CBS News, Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle a multistate lawsuit over child safety, and buried in that 130-page settlement was a clause releasing the company from future liability connected to the Cambridge Analytica breach. New Mexico declined the release and pressed on alone. Florida was the only other state to sit out the settlement, on the grounds that its terms were too soft on Meta.

The verdict extends a difficult stretch for the company in New Mexico courts. Earlier this year, the state won judgments totaling $942 million from Meta in a two-phase trial over its protections for minors, and the court ordered new safeguards, including age-verification technology and time limits across its platforms.

Why it matters

Few privacy claims against major platforms ever reach a jury; most end in settlements, regulatory fines or dismissal. This one produced a liability finding, and it demonstrates that states can still win deception cases even after broad settlements with liability releases have closed off other avenues. The penalty phase will be watched closely: the state is asking for the top fine per violation, the jury counted more than 2 million violations, and the final number now rests entirely with the judge. Meta's First Amendment defense, meanwhile, signals how platforms plan to contest future accountability claims, by casting decisions about data handling and platform management as protected speech. For users, the result is a reminder that the Cambridge Analytica scandal, years after it first made headlines, is still producing legal consequences for the company now known as Meta.