Court Orders Meta To Pay $25 Billion, Here’s Why

Breaking News: Meta must pay $25 billion, one of the largest penalties levied against the tech giant, for deceiving users about data privacy. https://t.co/Ne6UrUiwJD

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 21, 2026

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On Wednesday, Judge Francis J. Mathew of the State District Court in Santa Fe issued the landmark penalty.

The move was another blow to Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, as it has racked up court losses over the harms that its social media platforms have caused users. States and consumers have filed thousands of lawsuits over issues such as how Facebook and Instagram endangered child safety, led to social media addiction, used people’s data without their consent and infringed on their privacy.

New Mexico has been leading the charge against Meta, and winning. In August, a New Mexico judge ordered the company to pay $567 million in damages after a jury ruled the company had enabled harm to young users, on top of a $375 million penalty from the same case in March.

In both cases, New Mexico accused Meta of violating state consumer protection laws, which have emerged as an unlikely and effective way to litigate tech companies that have been previously shielded by laws that protect free speech, said Vincent Joralemon, the director of the Life Sciences Law and Policy Center at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology.

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Meta was ordered to pay a groundbreaking $25 billion civil penalty to the state of New Mexico in a consumer deception case spurred by the Cambridge Analytica scandal. https://t.co/JmAP4gNc1T

— Bloomberg (@business) October 21, 2026

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Meta previously resolved various Cambridge Analytica-derived data privacy lawsuits across the nation as part of an overarching August settlement of nearly $17 billion with a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case related to child safety and mental health. But because New Mexico was not part of the settlement, the state’s data privacy case that arose from Meta’s Cambridge Analytica scandal proceeded to trial in September.

In 2022, the social media giant agreed to pay $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit that also sprang from the company’s Cambridge Analytica scandal that kicked off in 2018. That scandal rocked the Mark Zuckerberg-led company before its official name change to Meta, and focused on allegations that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the information of 87 million users, raising questions about Facebook’s data handling practices.

Judge Mathew said in the filing that “Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised” following the Cambridge Analytica revelations.

“Pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations,” all contributed to what the judge characterized as a “willfully ineffective” internal examination by Facebook, the filing said.

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