New Mexico Judge Orders Meta To Pay $25 Billion in Cambridge Analytica Case

A New Mexico judge has ordered Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties over its handling of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, according to a court filing issued Wednesday. CNBC reports that New Mexico District Court Judge Francis Mathew signed the filing on October 21, closing out a legal fight that traces back to 2018, when it first came out that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had accessed data belonging to 87 million users. The incident predated the company’s rebranding from Facebook to Meta. A jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable in September for misleading New Mexico residents about how it collected and safeguarded their data and how it prevented harmful information from spreading. Jurors counted more than 43 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a possible civil penalty of up to $5,000. That math initially produced a $219.5 billion award, which Judge Mathew scaled back to $25 billion. Interest will accrue on the unpaid balance at 15 percent a year until Meta settles the debt in full. In his filing, Mathew wrote that “the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act – $5,000 per violation found by the jury.” He was just as harsh about how Facebook investigated itself after the Cambridge Analytica revelations broke. Facebook “did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised,” he wrote, pointing to “pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations.” He called the company’s internal examination “willfully ineffective.” Soros-backed New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, who oversaw the trial, framed the ruling as a warning to the tech industry. “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” Torrez said, adding that “this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences.” According to a source who shared their knowledge of the trial with Breitbart News, Torrez and his team included anti-Trump politics at multiple points in the trial. For example, New Mexico’s opening and closing statements reference the end of Meta’s third-party fact checking operation, notorious for censorship conservatives, saying: “because nobody likes being fact-checked, particularly people in power, when Donald Trump ascends to the presidency again, Facebook announces ‘we’re getting rid of third-party fact-checking program,'” sarcastically adding, “that was just a coincidence.” Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney pushed back hard and signaled an appeal is coming. In a statement provided to Breitbart News, he wrote: This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal. In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe and free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge. Numerous conservatives have criticized the New Mexico verdict. Christian First Amendment attorney and head of the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) Jordan Sekulow pointed out that New Mexico is imposing censorship at the threat of massive penalties. CNN pundit Scott Jennings views the entire trial as revenge for the 2016 election of President Trump: Conservative influencer ALX points out that leftists want to return to “independent fact checking” because of the dominance of far-left organizations adding fact checks to posts on Facebook. Read more at CNBC here. Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.