In a landmark ruling that signals a growing crackdown on big tech’s disregard for user privacy, Meta Platforms – the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – has been ordered to pay a $25 billion (£18.6 billion) fine, the largest punitive penalty the company has ever faced for deceptive business practices.
The ruling, handed down Wednesday by a New Mexico state judge following a two-week trial held earlier this year, found that Meta spent more than a decade lying to the public about its handling of Facebook user data. In his decision, Judge Francis Mathew emphasized that the company’s dishonesty was not limited to isolated data missteps, but instead penetrated to the core of Meta’s core operating model.
The legal case traces its origins back to the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal, when a political consulting firm harvested personal data from millions of unwitting Facebook users to aid its work on Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. Long after that scandal broke, New Mexico’s legal team argued, Meta executives continued to falsely claim that user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without explicit user consent – a falsehood that impacted roughly 2 million New Mexico residents, the entire state population. A jury in the case ultimately determined Meta violated state privacy laws more than 40 million times across an 11-year period of misconduct, stretching from 2010 to 2021.
Judge Mathew wrote in his formal order that internal communications among Meta’s top leadership, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were deliberately crafted to mislead the public. He characterized the violations as willful, and set the $25 billion fine – a figure roughly equal to Meta’s average quarterly profit – to match the scale of the deception. While the total potential penalty calculated from thousands of individual violations topped $219 billion, the judge reduced the final amount to $25 billion. State prosecutors had initially sought up to $40 billion in fines, while Meta had argued any penalty above $3.4 billion was unconstitutional.
This penalty marks the latest in a string of costly legal setbacks for Meta in 2025. Just months ago, New Mexico hit the company with a separate nearly $1 billion fine for misleading the public about how safe its platforms are for minors. The judge in that child safety case infamously compared Meta to an industrial polluter, noting that the company’s product pollutes the digital environment with “the psychological harm and sexual exploitation of children.”
Earlier this year, Meta also agreed to an $18 billion settlement with the state of California over child safety failures on its platforms. A multi-state lawsuit over similar child harm allegations just settled days into a planned multi-week trial, with Meta agreeing to resolve the case without paying a fine or admitting wrongdoing. The 2019 U.S. Federal Trade Commission previously fined Meta $5 billion over the same data privacy misconduct at the center of the New Mexico case, but Wednesday’s $25 billion penalty far outpaces that earlier action.
“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement following the ruling. “Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.” As of Thursday evening, a Meta spokesperson had not issued a response to requests for comment on the new ruling.