A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion on Wednesday, the largest penalty yet to come out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke nearly a decade ago.
The details are stranger than the headline. A Santa Fe jury found in September that Meta misled residents about how it collects and safeguards user data and how it keeps harmful information off its services. The jury counted more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices act, each carrying a civil penalty of up to $5,000. Judge Francis Mathew's filing showed the state was awarded $219.5 billion on that math, then he cut the penalty to $25 billion, per CNBC.
The judge did not hold back
Mathew cited "the extraordinary number of willful violations" and the involvement of senior Facebook leadership to justify the maximum per-violation fine. He also set interest at 15% a year until the penalty is paid in full. Fifteen percent of $25 billion is $3.75 billion, so every year of litigation adds real money to the tab.
The harshest passage is about what Facebook did after the scandal broke. "Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised," Mathew wrote, calling the internal review "willfully ineffective." He pointed to pressure from senior executives to keep costs down and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations.
Meta calls it a speech tax
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is "confident" it will "prevail on appeal" and argued the ruling "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico." His core claim is that the lawsuit is "a tax on speech."
I keep coming back to that framing. A jury found the company misled users about its data practices millions of times over. Calling that a speech tax is a choice, and it tells you exactly how Meta plans to fight the appeal.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the penalty shows "those violations carry real consequences." He also told reporters the payout could fund school construction for the next hundred years, per TechCrunch.
Why New Mexico is on its own
Meta settled with a coalition of state attorneys general in August for nearly $17 billion in a separate federal case tied to child safety and mental health. New Mexico was not part of that deal, so its Cambridge Analytica case went to trial. In 2022, Meta paid $725 million to settle a class action from the same scandal, which started in 2018 when the political consulting firm was found to have improperly accessed data from 87 million users. Cambridge Analytica grew out of a British defense contractor and worked with the Trump campaign in 2016, according to TechCrunch.
Torrez has made a habit of suing Meta. His office also led the state's child safety case, which produced a March jury ruling of $375 million and a later order for $567 million paid into an abatement fund. Meta said it disagreed with that ruling and planned to appeal.
My read: $25 billion is real money even at Meta's scale, and the 15% interest makes stalling expensive. But appeals in cases this size take years, and the final number often looks nothing like the headline figure. Nobody knows how this plays out.
Sources
- CNBC: Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case
- TechCrunch: Meta ordered to pay $25 billion in case related to Cambridge Analytica scandal