New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion for Privacy Misleading Fine
A New Mexico district judge, Francis Mathew, ruled on Wednesday that Meta must pay $25 billion to the state for misleading users about data privacy in public statements over a long period.
The case originated from a lawsuit filed in 2021 related to the Cambridge Analytica incident, where up to 87 million Facebook users' data was obtained through third-party applications. A jury found on September 25 that 26 out of 26 statements made by the company and its executives were misleading, constituting over 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law.
Each violation can incur a maximum fine of $5,000, leading to a statutory cap of approximately $219 billion, which the judge reduced to $25 billion. The misleading statements included claims that users could control their data sharing, that the company did not sell personal information to advertisers, and statements regarding the handling of hate speech, involving executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called this one of the largest single-state judgments in U.S. history, with the fines to be used for the state's school system. The company had previously reached settlements of about $459.2 million with other states over related issues and agreed to a multi-state settlement of up to $17.1 billion in August regarding youth mental health issues.
The judge noted that these misleading behaviors had been systematically communicated to the public for years and directly pointed to the company's core business practices, exhibiting intentional and systemic characteristics.
The fine will go to New Mexico's public education, while Meta faces pressure to appeal, as its advertising and data business model is under strain due to rising regulatory and litigation costs, potentially leading to a diversion of platform user trust and advertiser budgets.
Source: Public Information
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Meta had publicly committed to strengthening user data control and limiting third-party access multiple times around 2018 after the Cambridge Analytica incident, but the New Mexico case shows that its executives' statements continue to be deemed misleading. The company has already paid hundreds of millions in fines in various states over child safety lawsuits and agreed to product adjustments.
Resources are continuously invested in legal defense and settlement negotiations, while advertising revenue covers litigation costs, motivated by the need to maintain a business model centered on user data and avoid forced changes to data sharing and third-party developer interfaces.
This is similar to the path taken by the tobacco industry under state consumer protection laws and resembles the situation of large tech companies under the dual pressures of EU GDPR and U.S. state laws; the industry is currently in a phase of regulatory expansion and enhanced product control, with platforms being forced to reallocate between data monetization and compliance costs.
Essentially, this reflects regulatory changes: state consumer protection laws are being used to bypass federal speech protection frameworks, holding platforms accountable for the truthfulness of public statements post-factum, with the mechanism accumulating misleading statements based on audience size into massive violations, transforming one-time data incidents into ongoing legal liabilities.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
The louder the statement, the thicker the fine
The faster the data monetization, the longer the compliance bill
One public commitment, millions of violations