A New Mexico court has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after finding that Facebook repeatedly misled users about data privacy and content moderation. Judge Francis Mathew handed down the ruling on Oct. 21, following a September jury verdict that found 43.9 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act, and the penalty ranks among the largest ever imposed on a corporation in the US. Meta has confirmed it plans to appeal.
The case goes back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which revealed that personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users had been pulled through a third-party app and used for political advertising. New Mexico sued in 2021, accusing Meta of misleading users about who could access their data and how their information was collected, shared, and used. The trial also looked at Facebook’s public claims about its efforts against misinformation and hate speech.
Jurors found 26 of the 29 statements examined at trial to be misleading, counting violations by the number of people potentially exposed to each one. New Mexico law allows up to $5,000 per willful violation, which would have put Meta’s total liability at roughly $219.5 billion. Mathew cut that to $25 billion and attached 15% annual interest until it’s paid.
Meta is fighting both the verdict and the penalty. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney argued that the ruling improperly restricts online speech and would make operating in New Mexico extremely difficult. The company can also challenge how the violations were counted, particularly whether penalties should apply to everyone who could have seen a misleading statement, and legal experts who spoke to Reuters think that argument could bring the figure down substantially on appeal.
Gambling advertising is a separate legal headache for Meta. On Sept. 28, the Dutch Online Gambling Operators Association, VNLOK, summoned the company to the Amsterdam District Court, accusing it of letting ads for unlicensed online casinos run widely on Facebook and Instagram. That case turns on gambling advertising and compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act, whereas New Mexico’s penalty is about consumer deception and privacy.
More than 90% of the gambling ads VNLOK examined on Facebook promoted operators without Dutch licences, according to the association, which also says Meta removed only 11% of the illegal ads it flagged in May and 15% in June despite repeated requests for tighter controls. Those numbers come from VNLOK’s own investigations and haven’t been tested in court. What the association wants is for Meta to stop unlawful ads from being published in the first place, rather than mainly taking them down after users have already seen them.
Dutch broadcaster BNR found another problem in August, uncovering hundreds of ads for illegal casinos that openly targeted people registered with CRUKS, the Netherlands’ national gambling self-exclusion register. Some of them encouraged people who had excluded themselves from regulated gambling to play on sites outside the Dutch licensing system. BNR’s findings are about what the ads said, and don’t show that Meta accessed CRUKS records or used them to target individual users.
Real-money gambling operators need written permission from Meta before advertising on Facebook or Instagram, according to the company’s own policies, and they have to follow the laws of the countries they target and supply licensing documentation. British regulators have questioned how consistently Meta enforces that. In January, UK Gambling Commission executive director Tim Miller accused the company of letting illegal gambling sites advertise, including casinos pitching themselves as alternatives to operators signed up to the UK’s GamStop self-exclusion scheme.
VNLOK’s lawsuit asks the court to force Meta into stronger advertising controls, though nothing has yet established that the company broke European law. The association has also backed giving the Dutch gambling regulator more power to fine online platforms that fail to deal with illegal gambling ads, which would open up advertising platforms to direct penalties instead of limiting enforcement to the unlicensed casinos buying the ads.
Rhode Island has added another US lawsuit to the pile, suing Meta on Oct. 22 and accusing it of knowingly profiting from scam ads and failing to remove suspicious advertisers. The state is seeking civil penalties, restitution for consumers, and an injunction requiring stronger anti-fraud measures. Meta has rejected the allegations, and the New Mexico judgment remains open to appeal.