Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion in Cambridge Analytica Case

A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties in a case tied to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, according to a court filing reported by CNBC on Wednesday. The order follows a September jury verdict that found Facebook made deceptive statements to New Mexico consumers about user data and its response to the misuse of that data.

The figure is enormous, but it needs a careful reading. The jury found 43,899,725 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. Each could carry a penalty of up to $5,000, leaving a theoretical total above $219 billion. CNBC reports that the court set the final civil penalty at $25 billion. It is a court order, not a payment Meta has already made, and the company may challenge it.

New Mexico brought its case after the revelations that data from as many as 87 million Facebook users had been obtained through a third-party personality quiz and passed to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy linked to the 2016 US election. The lawsuit was not limited to the original data transfer. It examined what Facebook subsequently told users about privacy controls, third-party apps and its efforts to investigate misuse.

In its September account of the verdict, the New Mexico Department of Justice said jurors found Facebook’s statements about its investigation of third-party apps to be wilfully deceptive. The state said the case also concerned claims about how the platform handled misinformation and applied its community standards. That broader scope matters because it would be misleading to describe the $25 billion as a simple fine for the original data harvesting alone.

The amount was contested. New Mexico’s lawyers asked for a penalty of between $35 billion and $40 billion, Reuters reported earlier this month. CNBC says the judge has now fixed it at $25 billion. Meta had not supplied a response to CNBC when its report was published, so the company’s response to this specific order and any appeal should be watched closely.

This ruling should not be confused with Meta’s earlier nationwide settlement with state attorneys general, which primarily addressed children’s safety on Facebook and Instagram and also resolved some Cambridge Analytica-era privacy claims. New Mexico did not join that settlement, allowing its own privacy case to proceed. It is also separate from the state’s child-safety judgment against Meta, which TechBooky covered in August.

For Meta, the immediate issue is the size of the order and the prospect of an appeal. The wider significance is that representations made to users about privacy and platform oversight can generate liability long after the underlying scandal has faded from the daily news cycle. Nearly a decade after Cambridge Analytica became a byword for social-media data misuse, a state court has attached a $25 billion price to the way Facebook addressed those concerns in New Mexico.