New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25B in Privacy Case

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion to the state over the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, after a Santa Fe jury found more than 43 million violations of state consumer protection laws tied to deceiving Facebook users about privacy and content moderation. CNBC reported the amount Judge Francis Mathew handed down was reduced from a maximum civil penalty of more than $219 billion.

State Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the award as 'one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history.' Under the New Mexico Constitution, fines from consumer protection violations flow to state education spending. 'We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,' Torrez said, while acknowledging the money would be tied up if Meta appeals, which it is expected to do.

New Mexico and Florida were the only two states that declined to join the roughly $18 billion settlement 48 states signed with Meta in August, a deal that bundled social-media-harms-to-children claims with a release of Cambridge Analytica liability. New Mexico pressed on alone, taking the case to a Santa Fe jury that weighed evidence for a little more than two weeks.

In a court filing, Judge Mathew wrote that 'the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed.' The underlying conduct dates back more than a decade, to a personality quiz on Facebook that harvested data on roughly 350,000 New Mexicans and handed it to the political data firm Cambridge Analytica.

The verdict adds to a stretch of state and international enforcement actions we have been tracking closely in AI Weekly's regulation coverage. Meta plans to appeal.