A New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay $25 billion for misleading users about their privacy

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties on Wednesday, after a jury found in September that the company had misled users about their data privacy¹.

Judge Francis Mathew set the amount, handing New Mexico a win as the only state to take its claims to trial; 48 other states settled¹.

The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent^7,8.

The statements the jury found willfully deceptive include comments from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and from a former chief operating officer⁹. Zuckerberg had earlier testified before Congress about the company⁴.

How the court reached the figure

Mathew concluded that New Mexico was entitled to as much as $219.5 billion, based on the state’s maximum penalty of $5,000 multiplied by 43,899,720 violations¹.

The $25 billion he ordered is a fraction of that ceiling, but it is still the largest penalty to date against Facebook’s owner, and it exceeds the $18bn deal Meta struck with California^2,3.

The penalties come nearly a decade after the Cambridge Analytica scandal first broke¹. Meta has already been hit with numerous legal fines this year³.

Why it matters to investors

The ruling signals that large technology companies can face significant financial consequences for misleading users about privacy, years after the conduct in question¹.

It also puts a price on the choice to fight rather than settle. New Mexico alone pursued its claims through a trial, and the result is a penalty larger than the California settlement that had been the biggest against the company^1,2.

Coverage of the case has framed it as a marker not only for Meta but for social media and artificial intelligence companies more broadly⁶.

The per-violation formula matters as much as the headline figure. A ceiling of $5,000 for each violation, applied across 43,899,720 violations, shows how quickly a state consumer-protection penalty can compound once a court counts individual users¹.

The coverage reviewed does not set out Meta’s next legal step or whether the company intends to challenge the amount. The penalty adds to a year in which the company has already paid a string of legal fines, and it arrives as the company’s conduct toward users remains a subject of scrutiny in courts and in Congress^3,4.