A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties, Axios reported Wednesday, after a jury found in September that the social media company misled users about its data practices.
The case centered on a 2018 scandal in which a personality-quiz app harvested data from roughly 87 million Facebook profiles and passed it to Cambridge Analytica, which used it for targeted political advertising around the 2016 U.S. election.
New Mexico's lawsuit argued that Facebook, now Meta, gave misleading assurances about users' control over their data, advertiser access and how it investigated third-party apps after the breach became public.
Jurors reviewed 29 company statements and found 26 of them misleading, tallying more than 43 million violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act based on how many residents each statement affected.
The jury also weighed claims about Meta's handling of hate speech, misinformation and content moderation, accepting some and rejecting others.
New Mexico's law permits penalties of up to $5,000 per willful violation; the state had earlier suggested a maximum calculation topping $200 billion, before later reporting put its actual request closer to $35 to $40 billion.
The judge's final figure, $25 billion, converts the jury's violation findings into a civil penalty under state law.
Read more about Meta Platforms
