A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay a 25 billion dollar fine.
According to a BBC report, the judge handed out the fine after a two-week trial found that Meta had spent years lying about how it handled Facebook user data.
The media report says the fine is the largest ever handed to Meta and follows several other lawsuits settled by the company in 2026, including an 18-billion-dollar deal with California over child safety.
“The lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices and go to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” the judge said.
The case arose from Meta’s role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from millions of Facebook users was used for political consulting.
The scandal was linked to work done during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which saw Donald Trump elected for the first time.
New Mexico lawyers sued Meta over claims that executives had told the public that user data was never shared with third parties without permission.
The lawyers found that Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times, affecting roughly two million people in New Mexico.
New Mexico’s Attorney General, Mr Raul Torrez, said no company was too powerful to be held accountable.
“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” Torrez said
“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” Torrez said.
The state lawyers have sought up to 40 billion dollars in fines, while Meta argued anything beyond 3.4 billion dollars would be unconstitutional.
Judge Francis Mathew said Meta’s violations spanned more than 11 years, stretching from 2010 to 2021, and were willful.
He said communications between senior executives, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, were designed to mislead the public.
Mathew reduced the full calculated penalty of 219 billion dollars to the 25 billion dollar fine.
Meta’s head lawyer, Mr CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it almost impossible to do business in New Mexico and the company planned to appeal.
The fine follows a five-billion-dollar penalty levied against Meta in 2019 by the United States Federal Trade Commission over data privacy.
New Mexico also fined Meta almost one billion dollars this year for misleading the public about the safety of its platforms for children.
In spite of the fines, Meta is spending heavily on Artificial Intelligence (AI) infrastructure, with its AI tool, Muse, already used by 10 million people.
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