ALBUQUERQUE: A judge ordered Meta Platforms on Wednesday to pay $25 billion to the US state of New Mexico after a jury found the company had misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.
New Mexico’s attorney general Ral Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing over the course of years, and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order following the verdict.
Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219bn was warranted, based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25bn.
The ruling comes after six other states settled their lawsuits related to Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm, for $459.2 million as part of a $17.1bn multistate settlement Meta reached in August to resolve states’ claims that the company’s platforms had harmed teen mental health.
New Mexico’s attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87m Facebook users through a third-party app.
The state accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about who had access to their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation posted on the platform and other internal policies.
The company knew that third parties had broad access to users’ personal data, and it tolerated hate speech or other harmful content when it benefited the company’s bottom line, the state said.
Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, worked for Trump’s successful presidential campaign in 2016, and gained access to the personal information from millions of Facebook accounts for the purposes of voter profiling and targeting.
The consulting firm obtained that information without users’ consent from a researcher who had been allowed by Facebook to deploy an app on its social media network that harvested data from millions of its users.
Published in Dawn, October 22nd, 2026
