New Mexico asks judge to order Meta to pay $35-40B in penalties after Cambridge Analytica privacy verdict
What happened
At a penalty hearing in Santa Fe on Thursday, Oct. 1, attorneys for the state of New Mexico asked Judge Francis Mathew to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in civil penalties, after a jury ruled Sept. 25 that the company misled Facebook users about data privacy in a case stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Jurors examined 29 statements by Meta and its leadership and found 26 misleading, tallying more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer-protection law. Meta called the proposed penalty 'astronomical' and argued it should be capped at $3.45 billion, saying the state's ask doesn't match the conduct the case focused on at trial. Judge Mathew, who is expected to set the penalty later this month, was unsympathetic to the company at the hearing: 'Well, when the parties go to trial, they roll the dice,' he said. 'They have to accept the consequences of their decision to go to trial, do they not?'
Why it matters & what’s next are part of Pro, along with the audio summary.
Start your free 14-day trialWho’s affected
- META (Meta Platforms): direct defendant; a headline penalty of up to $40B is ~1% of market cap but the actual award is expected to be far smaller. Broader ad-tech/social media and privacy-exposed large caps (e.g., GOOGL) as a precedent-setting state enforcement benchmark.