New Mexico Jury Finds Meta Liable in 43 Million Privacy Violations Over Cambridge Analytica Scandal

A jury in Santa Fe ruled Friday, September 25, that Facebook violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act by lying to users about how their data was handled, according to the Associated Press. Jurors found more than 43 million violations. A judge still has to decide the actual penalty.

State attorneys asked for the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation, according to the AP and CBS News. That would put a theoretical ceiling at $215 billion. Nobody expects the judge to hand down that number. The penalty phase is separate, and the judge has full discretion, according to Gallup Sun Weekly.

What The Jury Actually Found

The two-week trial centered on the 2016 Cambridge Analytica breach, where a third-party personality quiz harvested data from roughly 87 million Facebook profiles and sold it to the now-defunct political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, whose clients included the 2016 Trump campaign, according to the AP.

Jurors found Facebook made false or misleading statements telling consumers they controlled how their information was shared, that Facebook didn't sell data to advertisers, and that it didn't buy or sell user data, according to Gallup Sun Weekly. Those statements affected New Mexico's entire population of more than two million people, jurors found.

Jurors separately found Facebook liable for more than two million violations tied to misleading the public about its promised investigation into third-party app developers after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, according to PBS and CBS News. The company had promised forensic audits, developer bans, and notifications to affected users. The jury found those promises were willfully deceptive.

Meta didn't win on everything. Jurors sided with the company on one significant point: the state failed to prove Facebook made false claims about removing harmful content, including COVID-19 misinformation, according to News4Jax and CTV News.

New Mexico's Attorney General Takes A Victory Lap

"For years, Facebook operated as if the rules that apply to everyone else didn't apply to them," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement carried by CBS News. "Today, a jury of New Mexicans said otherwise. This is a historic verdict, not just for New Mexico, but for every state fighting to hold Big Tech accountable."

Torrez added a warning aimed squarely at Silicon Valley: "If you lie to New Mexicans about how you use their data, we will find out, and we will hold you accountable."

Meta's Defense

Meta spokesperson Alex Burgos told News4Jax and CBS News the company disagrees with the verdict and will keep defending itself "against efforts to distort our record." Burgos leaned on the First Amendment: "We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community. This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users' information and giving them control over their data."

Meta's lawyers argued during closing arguments that the state's evidence was stale, according to the AP. Despite five years to build a case since New Mexico filed the lawsuit in 2021, the state found only one additional instance of a data breach beyond Cambridge Analytica, the company argued. Facebook also told jurors it removes 99% of content that violates its standards, and played a deposition in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the company's content moderation systems, according to News4Jax.

The First Amendment question of whether a platform can manage its own content policy is a real legal issue that courts have wrestled with for years. But the jury wasn't asked only to judge content moderation. It was asked whether Facebook lied about what it does with user data and whether it kept promises about investigating the Cambridge Analytica fallout. On those specific questions, jurors sided with the state.

Why New Mexico Even Got A Trial

Meta agreed in August to pay up to $18 billion to settle a multistate lawsuit over child safety concerns, according to Reuters and Engadget. Buried in that 130-page settlement was a release from future liability tied to Cambridge Analytica. New Mexico and Florida refused to sign, with Florida saying the settlement wasn't tough enough on the company, according to the AP. That refusal is the only reason this trial happened at all.

This isn't New Mexico's first swing at Meta this year. The state already won judgments totaling $942 million against the company in a separate two-phase trial over safety protections for minors, with the court ordering Meta to roll out age-verification technology and time limits on its platforms, according to CBS News and the AP.

Meta has now settled or lost Cambridge Analytica-related cases in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, according to Engadget. This latest New Mexico verdict is the one place a jury actually heard the case rather than the company writing a settlement check.

The next step is the penalty phase, where the judge decides what New Mexico's 43 million violations are actually worth. Given the size of the numbers on the table, the range between "symbolic" and "company-altering" is enormous, and neither side knows yet which one they're getting.