A New Mexico judge fined Meta $25 billion (about £18.6bn) after finding that the company spent years misleading the public about how it handled Facebook users’ data.
Judge Francis Mathew issued the penalty on October 21, 2026, following a two-week trial earlier in the year. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a political consulting firm used data from millions of Facebook users. New Mexico argued that Meta executives repeatedly said user data was never shared with third parties without permission when it had been, and that Meta also misled the public about hate speech on its platforms. The jury found Meta violated state law more than 40 million times. The judge called the conduct willful and said it ran from 2010 to 2021. The full calculated penalty was $219 billion, but he reduced it to $25 billion, roughly one quarter of Meta’s profits. The state had sought up to $40 billion, while Meta argued anything above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional. It is Meta’s largest fine to date, and the company says it will appeal.
Source: BBC News, Meta fined $25bn for ‘lies’ over user data privacy (October 21, 2026)
Image: Meta headquarters sign, Menlo Park, by Nokia621, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.