‘Facebook’s wrongdoing’: Why has Meta been fined $25bn in New Mexico?

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25bn after finding that the company intentionally misled consumers about the privacy of their data. Judge Francis Mathew said state law warranted a penalty of more than $219bn but reduced it to $25bn. Attorney General Raul Torrez called the verdict one of the largest against a company by a US state, while Meta chief legal officer CJ Mahoney said the company was confident it would win on appeal. The lawsuit, filed in 2021, followed revelations that Cambridge Analytica harvested data from as many as 87 million Facebook users to target political ads during the 2016 US election campaign.