Meta’s Cambridge Analytica reckoning reaches a New Mexico jury

• A Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for misleading New Mexico residents about Facebook’s data privacy and speech policies, in a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.¹
• Jurors counted more than 43 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act. They found most of the statements examined misleading, but rejected some claims about Facebook’s content-removal and fact-checking practices.¹
• Judge Francis Mathew will decide the civil penalty. New Mexico’s lawyers are seeking the maximum allowed per violation; no final amount has been set.¹
• Meta disputes the verdict and says it will continue to defend itself, arguing that the case involves its First Amendment rights.²

The verdict reaches beyond Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of Facebook users’ data: the jury also considered claims about what the company said about hate speech, misinformation and its policies. That makes the case a test of whether public statements by a technology company can be treated as consumer deception under state law—not simply a reckoning over one notorious data scandal.¹

New Mexico pressed ahead after other states settled similar Cambridge Analytica claims with Meta. The liability finding is in; what it will cost the company, and whether Meta challenges the result, remain unresolved.²

Footnotes

1. Reuters, “Meta misled users about Facebook data practices, New Mexico jury finds”, 25 September 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. CBS News/AP, “Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case”, 25 September 2026. ↩ ↩²