A jury in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has found Facebook liable for deceiving users about their privacy protections, delivering another significant legal blow to Meta, the social media giant led by Mark Zuckerberg. The verdict, returned on Friday, found that Facebook's failures affected all of New Mexico's roughly 2.1 million residents. A judge will now determine the financial penalty, with state attorneys seeking the maximum $5,000 per violation — a figure that could reach as high as $63 billion, according to a financial disclosure filed by Meta itself.

The two-week trial centred on the Cambridge Analytica scandal, first revealed in 2018, in which a third-party personality quiz harvested data from approximately 87 million Facebook profiles without users' knowledge. That data was sold to Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm whose clients included Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Jurors found that Facebook not only failed to protect users' data but also misled the public about subsequent investigations into data brokers, ruling the company liable for more than two million violations. Among the conduct found deceptive was a personal pledge by Zuckerberg to notify users affected by such data misuse. Meta has denied wrongdoing and said it will appeal, with a spokesperson stating the company