Meta agreed to pay $25 billion to New Mexico for deceiving users and regulators about its data privacy practices and its response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The penalty concerns Facebook’s misleading statements, rather than the alleged political harm caused by the exploitation of the harvested data. As part of a roughly $17 billion multistate settlement reached in August 2026, $459.3 million was allocated to Cambridge Analytica-related claims, while participating states released Meta from all known and unknown claims. New Mexico opted out of the settlement and secured the largest privacy penalty in American history, but the consequences of voter profiling and the exploitation of people’s psychological vulnerabilities remain largely unaccounted for.
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