The state of New Mexico has imposed one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in US history. The corporation? Meta. The tech giant was found liable for misleading citizens about their data privacy and will now have to pay $25 billion.

The penalty is a result of a data privacy case that stemmed from Meta’s Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. The company faced allegations that a political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign obtained data from millions of Facebook users without consent.

In September, a jury in a Santa Fe courthouse found Meta liable for misleading New Mexico citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data and prevents harmful information from spreading on its services.

Facebook’s wrongdoing – over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public – goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,

state District Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order following the verdict.

And it could have been worse. The jury actually concluded that Meta had violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times, and each transgression carries a civil penalty as high as $5,000.

The filing showed that New Mexico was awarded $219.5 billion but the judge ultimately reduced the penalty to $25 billion.

Still, New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said it was one of the largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against a company in American history.

“This is a historic day for New Mexico and for consumers across the country,” said Torrez in a press release.

“For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law,” Torrez added, claiming that “this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences.”

Meta argued that any amount over $3.45 billion was unconstitutional. The company’s chief legal officer C.J.Mahoney said in a statement it was confident in the success of its upcoming appeal.

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said.

“At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”

In 2018, Facebook was accused of misleading users about its privacy protections after data from around 87 million profiles was harvested through a third-party personality quiz and then passed to Cambridge Analytica for targeted advertising.

The firm, which shut down almost immediately, used Facebook data for voter profiling and helped Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The scandal rocked the boat so wildly that Facebook had to change its official name to Meta.