Imagine a bill so big the judge had to talk it down. A New Mexico judge just ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over how Facebook handled user data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. According to CNN’s report on the ruling, it is one of the largest legal penalties ever imposed on a tech company. The Meta $25 billion penalty is also a rare case of a state court going far beyond a typical tech fine.
Judge Francis Mathew issued the order Wednesday in Santa Fe. The penalty follows a jury verdict from September, when jurors found that Meta misled users about their privacy.
How the Cambridge Analytica penalty adds up
The math behind the number is the wild part. The jury found Meta violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act 43,899,720 times, according to Axios. At the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation, the bill would have reached $219.5 billion. Instead, the judge cut it to $25 billion (a discount, technically).
That is still a lot of money. New Mexico originally asked for $35 billion to $40 billion. Meanwhile, Meta’s lawyers argued for no more than $3.4 billion, and said anything above $34 billion would violate due process, The Hill reports. In the end, the judge landed between the two sides.
What the judge said about the Meta $25 billion penalty
Mathew did not soften his language. “Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” he wrote in the order, per Tempo. He also called the company’s misrepresentations “a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model.”
The scandal itself is old news. Cambridge Analytica got data on as many as 87 million Facebook users and used it to build profiles of American voters. New Mexico sued in 2021, and forty-eight other states settled.
New Mexico was the only one that took its claims to trial, per Axios. That choice is why this Facebook $25 billion judgment exists at all.
Here’s the thing: don’t expect a check soon
Meta says it will fight. “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said, as CNBC reported. He added: “We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sees the win very differently. “We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,” he said, according to TechCrunch. If the judgment survives, the money goes to public education in the state.
Because of the appeal, though, Torrez admitted the full amount may be tied up for a long time. Meta’s other recent legal headaches, like the Muse AI chat leak that exposed 6,800 links, show the company’s privacy problems are far from over.
Meta has paid this bill before, sort of
This is not Meta’s first Cambridge Analytica invoice. The company paid $5 billion to the FTC, $100 million to the SEC and £500,000 to the UK data regulator. It also agreed to a $725 million class-action settlement in 2022.
So who really feels this one? Probably not Meta’s bottom line. CNN notes that court penalties and settlements have stayed small next to the company’s earnings so far, and Meta reported its quarterly results the same day as the ruling.
Even so, this Meta privacy penalty is a different order of magnitude. Torrez framed it as a warning to Big Tech and the AI companies coming up behind it, much like the fights over who pays for Google’s data center power deal in Minnesota.
The next question is not whether Meta appeals. It’s whether any court lets a single state’s judge set a price tag this big.
