Years after the initial fallout from the Cambridge Analytica scandal shook the technology industry, Meta is still dealing with the legal consequences of its past data practices. In the latest blow to the social media giant, a New Mexico jury has formally found that Meta violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act, ruling that the company misled state residents regarding their data privacy and how it handled misinformation on its platforms.
The verdict stems from a lawsuit originally filed by the state of New Mexico back in 2021. The legal action was launched in direct response to the massive Cambridge Analytica data harvesting scandal, an event that exposed how data gathered from tens of millions of Facebook users was exploited without their consent to target political advertisements during the pivotal 2016 US presidential election.
Throughout the trial, New Mexico’s legal team argued that Meta engaged in deceptive trade practices by misrepresenting the scope of permissions granted to third-party applications accessing its ecosystem. The state also pointed out that Meta maintained privacy settings that were intentionally vague or difficult for everyday users to understand. Furthermore, the lawsuit challenged the company’s public assurances that it enforced its hate speech and content policies equally across all user accounts, regardless of their status or platform influence.
Legal counsel representing Meta acknowledged during the proceedings that the company had made errors in judgment regarding how it managed user privacy and monitored misinformation during that turbulent period in its history. However, the company’s defense firmly denied that it ever engaged in the direct selling of user data to outside entities or that it financially benefited from hosting or promoting hate speech on its platforms.
Despite those defenses, the jury ultimately sided with the state of New Mexico, determining that Meta’s actions constituted clear violations of local consumer protection laws. A presiding judge has yet to determine the precise financial penalties or fines that Meta will face as a result of the verdict. Outlets have reached out to Meta seeking official commentary regarding the jury’s decision, with further updates expected should the company issue a formal statement.
The Cambridge Analytica controversy remains one of the darkest chapters in the history of social media, involving the unauthorized harvesting of personal information from approximately 50 million Facebook users. The magnitude of the scandal forced the company to undergo a sweeping corporate restructuring, which notably included changing its parent company name to Meta in late 2021—a move widely interpreted as an effort to distance the platform’s future aspirations from its past regulatory and public relations nightmares.
In the years following the 2018 revelations, Meta has attempted to put the Cambridge Analytica chapter behind it by negotiating various multi-million and multi-billion-dollar settlement agreements with regulatory bodies and class-action plaintiffs across multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia.
Just recently, Meta reached a massive settlement with 47 US states addressing separate allegations concerning child safety and youth well-being on its platforms, a sweeping agreement valued at approximately $18 billion. That overarching deal included a specific carve-out payment of $459 million intended to resolve remaining standalone Cambridge Analytica lawsuits nationwide. However, New Mexico and Florida notably declined to participate in that specific portion of the broader settlement arrangement. Because New Mexico chose not to join the nationwide resolution, its individual litigation was allowed to proceed to a full jury trial, culminating in the recent verdict against Meta.
