The Cambridge Analytica scandal became the Democrats' first excuse for Donald Trump's 2016 win.
Now a Democrat attorney general in New Mexico has turned that same scandal into a jury verdict against Facebook.
And the payday his office is chasing would dwarf anything Facebook has ever paid.
Jurors Threw Out 26 of Facebook's 29 Promises
A Santa Fe jury handed down the verdict on September 25, five years after New Mexico filed suit in 2021.
The case traces back to Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm that scooped up data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
The firm did data work for the Trump campaign, which is why the media treated it like the crime of the century.
Jurors reviewed 29 public statements from Meta and its executives.
They found 26 of them misleading.
Those statements covered more than data.
They also covered how Facebook handled hate speech, "misinformation" and exceptions to platform rules.
That's the same content-policing machine conservatives watched get turned against them for years.
One came straight from Mark Zuckerberg in 2010.
"You have control over how your information is shared," Zuckerberg told users.
New Mexico families kept posting birthday photos and grandkids' ball games because they believed it.
The jury didn't buy it.
Then they did the math.
Every statement that ran through major news outlets counted as 2.1 million violations.
Every statement pushed through Facebook's company channels counted as 1.4 million more.
Add it up and the total topped 43 million.
State law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation.
Run the numbers and the theoretical maximum clears $219 billion.
That's bigger than the $206 billion tobacco settlement of 1998.
Raúl Torrez Wants Up to $40 Billion and the Users Get None of It
Attorney General Raúl Torrez sought the maximum penalty on every violation.
At the penalty hearing, state attorney Randi McGinn asked Santa Fe County Judge Francis Mathew for $35 billion to $40 billion.
That's roughly 20 percent of the jury's number, trimmed to get ahead of the constitutional challenge everyone knows is coming.
McGinn told the judge it was time to "speak to Meta in the only language that it understands."
A civil penalty under New Mexico's consumer protection law goes to the state.
Not one dollar of it goes back to the New Mexicans Facebook actually misled.
Torrez already won $942 million in judgments against Meta in 2026 over child safety.
A March jury found Meta failed to protect kids from predators, and the judge added a youth mental health fund on top in August.
Torrez said Meta executives "lied to the public about what they knew."
On kids, he had the goods.
But $40 billion would be a windfall for a Democrat-run state government, and Torrez would collect the credit.
Meta attorney Matt Nicholson told the court even the state's reduced figure is unconstitutionally excessive.
The company has vowed to keep fighting what it calls "efforts to distort our record."
Judge Mathew has signaled he believes a much smaller fine is appropriate, and a ruling is expected in October.
Zuckerberg Found Free Speech Only After the Damage Was Done
Facebook earned plenty of this.
In an August 2024 letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Zuckerberg admitted senior Biden administration officials "repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content."
He also conceded Facebook should never have demoted the New York Post's Hunter Biden laptop reporting before the 2020 election.
In January 2025, Zuckerberg finally changed course.
"We're going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with Community Notes," he announced.
That's a welcome turn.
But every statement the jury judged came from the years before it, when Facebook told users one thing and did another.
A late conversion doesn't erase a decade of broken promises.
It also doesn't change who gets paid for them.
Facebook Broke the Promises, the State Gets the Check, and AI-Slop “Truth” Arbiters Are Probably Next
The Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook with a record $5 billion penalty over Cambridge Analytica in July 2019.
That money went to the federal government too.
Facebook paid it and kept right on growing into a trillion-dollar empire.
A company that size treats a fine like a parking ticket.
So Meta shrugs, the state cashes the check, and the grandmother who trusted Facebook's promises gets nothing but a news story.
Forty-three million violations isn't a glitch.
It's a business model.
But it’s also the excuse elites on both sides of the aisle seem to now be looking to use to usher in a new, likely AI-driven, censorship regime to silence inconvenient voices.
Sources:
- Joe Duhownik, "Facebook Faced With Massive Penalties After New Mexico Privacy Verdict," Courthouse News Service, October 1, 2026.
- Bill Pan, "Meta Could Face Billions in Penalties After New Mexico Facebook Verdict," The Epoch Times, September 27, 2026.
- Wendy Davis, "Jury Finds Meta Deceived Users About Privacy, Content Moderation," MediaPost, September 25, 2026.
- Howard Kurtz, "Zuckerberg, Expressing Regrets, Admits Bowing to Biden Administration Pressure to Remove Content," Fox News, August 28, 2024.
- Brooke Singman, "Meta Ends Fact-Checking Program as Zuckerberg Vows to Restore Free Expression on Facebook, Instagram," Fox News, January 7, 2025.
- Lucas Nolan, "New Mexico Jury Rules Zuckerberg's Meta Failed to Protect Children, Orders $375 Million in Damages," Breitbart, March 25, 2026.
- Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Imposes $5 Billion Penalty and Sweeping New Privacy Restrictions on Facebook," Federal Trade Commission, July 24, 2019.
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