PolicyTechMetaMeta ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties over the Cambridge Analytica scandalIt\u2019s significantly more than it agreed to pay in a recent kids online safety settlement.It\u2019s significantly more than it agreed to pay in a recent kids online safety settlement.by Lauren FeinerOct 21, 2026, 7:02 PM UTCShareGiftMark Zuckerberg. Image: Cath Virginia \/ The Verge, Getty ImagesPart OfSocial media on trial: tech giants face lawsuits over addiction, safety, and mental healthsee all updates Lauren Feiner is a senior policy reporter at The Verge, covering the intersection of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill. She spent 5 years covering tech policy at CNBC, writing about antitrust, privacy, and content moderation reform.The Cambridge Analytica scandal has come back to haunt Meta after a New Mexico judge ordered it to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state\u2019s unfair practices law. The ruling marks the biggest legal hit Meta has taken this year, even as it\u2019s faced several other losses or settlements.A New Mexico jury ruled in September that Meta misled consumers over how it protected their data and prevented misinformation and hate speech on its platforms.<\/p>\n
The case stemmed from a 2021 complaint in the wake of the revelations a few years earlier that UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook accounts to pinpoint messages that would resonate with voters leading up to President Donald Trump\u2019s first election. The judge found that the \u201cextraordinary 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,\u201d and other factors justified the highest penalty allowed under the law, at $5,000 per violation. That brings the total civil penalties to more than $219 billion, but the judge reduced it to $25 billion. Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.\u201cNew Mexico stood its ground\u201dEven this smaller sum is \u201cone of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in U.S. history,\u201d according to the AG\u2019s office, and dwarfs other recent rulings and settlements involving Meta.<\/p>\n
In another landmark ruling in New Mexico state court, Meta was ordered to pay a total of nearly $1 billion in civil penalties and abatement for misleading the public about the safety of its products. In a separate agreement with most other state AGs, Meta settled an array of kids online safety complaints for $17.1 billion \u2014 but $5.3 billion of that is contingent on YouTube and TikTok installing similar measures.New Mexico Attorney General Ra\u00fal Torrez issued a triumphant statement after the latest in his string of wins against Meta (though the company managed to fight off many of the business changes the AG asked for in the remedies portion of the kids online safety case). \u201cThis case has always been about more than one company or one scandal,\u201d Torrez said. \u201cIt is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences. New Mexico stood its ground, took this case to trial, and secured a verdict establishing millions of violations of our law.\u201dFollow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Lauren FeinerMetaPolicySocial MediaTechTikTok employees said they knew about child safety issues, but execs failed to actJess WeatherbedOct 20Florida asked a judge to order Meta to remove kids under 14 from its platforms.Stevie BonifieldOct 7Meta employees ordered \u2018attorney\/client privilege\u2019 hats while fighting child safety disclosuresRichard LawlerSep 24Most PopularThe iPhone Duo is a messy, expensive, good timeA critical PHP vulnerability may take websites down todayThe Gospel according to Peter (Thiel)Can you see everything?EA is shutting down BioWareAdvertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
PolicyTechMetaMeta ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties over the Cambridge Analytica scandalIt\u2019s significantly more than it agreed to pay in a recent kids online safety settlement.It\u2019s significantly more than it agreed to pay in\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":30178,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30177\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30178"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.tcjhomeaccents.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}