META ORDERED TO PAY $25 BILLION OVER CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA FALLOUT

A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to begin paying $25 billion to the state — the largest payout the company has ever been ordered to make. The order followed a two-week trial in which a jury found the Facebook and Instagram parent committed 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws, at $5,000 per violation, for deceiving users over its data privacy practices. Part of the case centered on Meta’s handling of a third-party app linked to the Cambridge Analytica breach; the rest covered its privacy policies and its handling of misinformation.

The state’s attorney general, Raúl Torrez, put the scale in plain terms at a press conference: the payout could fund the construction of schools “for the next 100 years.” Meta says it will appeal, and its chief legal officer called the ruling “a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” insisting the company is confident it will prevail on appeal.

The tail of the Cambridge Analytica scandal — the British political-influence firm that worked with the 2016 Trump campaign on harvested Facebook data — keeps costing Meta. A decade of penalties later, this one dwarfs every prior fine: the company’s previous record was the $5 billion FTC settlement in 2019.