Meta hit with $25bn fine by New Mexico judge for 'systematic' privacy deceptions
By Mike Swift, Xu Yuan and Madeline Hughes ( October 21, 2026, 20:28 GMT | Insight) -- A New Mexico judge imposed a $25 billion penalty on Meta Platforms for systematically deceiving users about privacy over more than a decade, citing senior executives’ involvement and broken promises after the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal in 2018. The fine was based on a jury verdict in September that found nearly 44 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection law over Meta's deceptive or unfair statements around user privacy. Judge Francis Mathew called Meta’s investigation of app developers “willfully ineffective," and referred to "a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model.” Meta is expected to appeal the penalty, which would dwarf the FTC’s $5 billion privacy fine in 2019.A $25 billion penalty against Meta Platforms was the result of “a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model” in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other leaders knowingly deceived their users for more than a decade over their lack of privacy, a New Mexico judge said Wednesday....
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