Meta Ordered to Pay $25 Billion After Court Finds 43 Million Privacy Violations
Oct 22, 2026
Data Privacy / Regulatory
Social media giant Meta was ordered to pay 25 billion in penalties by a New Mexico court on Wednesday as part of a data privacy lawsuit that sprang from the company's Cambridge Analytica data scandal , which came to light in 2018. According to multiple reports from the Associated Press , the New York Times , Reuters , and the Wall Street Journal , state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew called out Meta and Facebook for making misleading statements about the privacy of consumers in the state. "Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data," Mathew wrote in his ruling. "This was false." The penalty relates to more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. The case, filed in 2021, was filed in the aftermath of revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, obtained data belonging to millions of Facebook users without their consent to build psychographic profiles. The data was ...
