Meta to pay New Mexico a historic US$25 billion in Cambridge Analytica Facebook case

Meta Platforms was ordered to pay a groundbreaking US$25 billion civil penalty to the state of New Mexico in a consumer deception case spurred by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The fine issued by state court Judge Francis Mathew is among the largest verdicts issued in US legal history.

The award comes after a jury in Santa Fe determined that Meta had violated the state’s consumer protection over 43 million times based on widely viewed deceptive statements made by the company and its top executives about how it handled hate speech and user data.

Under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, Mathew could issue penalties of up to US$5,000 per violation.

The two-week trial in the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico centred on claims by Attorney General Raul Torrez that Meta had lied to Facebook users about its privacy policies and how it handled their data in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica leak almost a decade ago.

The attorney general also advanced claims that the company deceived the public about content moderation decisions and its hate speech policies, pointing to evidence that certain high-profile accounts were not subject to the same scrutiny as ordinary users.

Jurors saw video deposition testimony from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

Meta has been willing to pay large sums to settle cases involving the Cambridge Analytica leak, which involved a political consulting firm using ill-gotten data on millions of Facebook users to target voters for Donald Trump before the 2016 election.

The Menlo Park, California, company paid out US$5 billion to settle with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, and signed a US$725 million settlement in 2022 to resolve a consumer class action.

Meta paid US$459 million in an agreement this summer to resolve cases from 46 states and two territories.

But New Mexico has been an especially costly thorn in the side of Meta, opting out of state AG coalitions prosecuting the company and instead going it alone.

The penalty award for New Mexico comes months after the state became the first in the nation to win a jury verdict against Meta over claims that Facebook and Instagram harm teen mental health and foster child sexual exploitation.

That trial from earlier this year saw a US$375 million civil penalty followed by an additional US$567 million payment Meta must make to the state to set up programmes to combat the youth mental health crisis.