Pressure Systems edition
New Mexico Hits Meta With Record Privacy Penalty
October 27, 2026
What this edition shows
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for millions of Cambridge Analytica privacy violations, mounting unprecedented legal pressure against Mark Zuckerberg's platform empire. Yet with two in five Americans still relying on Facebook for daily news and regimes like Belarus leveraging platform surveillance, retroactive legal penalties struggle to curb commercial monopolies over public discourse. As Big Tech consolidates information distribution behind proprietary metrics, state litigation exposes the growing rift between judicial enforcement and platform power.
Reporting and analysis behind this edition 11 sources
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Meta ordered to pay $25 billion in penalties over the Cambridge Analytica scandal
Mark Zuckerberg. | Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images The Cambridge Analytica scandal has come back to haunt Meta after a New Mexico judge ordered it to pay $25 billion in penalties for more than 43 million violations of the state's unfair practices law. The ruling marks the biggest lega…
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Meta shocked by $25B fine after N.M. refused to join multistate settlement
Meta will appeal a ruling imposing the largest fine Mark Zuckerberg has ever seen.
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Judge orders Meta to pay $25bn in fines for Facebook privacy violations
A jury found Meta guilty of lying to Facebook users in New Mexico about access to their data.
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‘Facebook’s wrongdoing’: Why has Meta been fined $25bn in New Mexico?
The tech giant has been accused of misleading users regarding data privacy linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
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How Many Billions Would It Take to Hold Meta Accountable?
Meta got hit this week with its biggest fine yet, the latest in a mounting pile of court-ordered payments.
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Big Tech and authoritarian states: Belarus
In the latest GV podcast, we discussed why Russia restricts access to many social media services, while Belarus does not impose comparable restrictions; censorship, surveillance, and digital authoritarianism — Belarusian style.
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Two out of five Americans regularly get their news on Facebook
Despite what my Facebook feed looks like, the platform’s not just for AI fruit videos and birthday posts. According to data from the Pew Research Center published Monday, 40% of adults in the United States regularly get their news from Facebook. That’s up from 36% in 2020, signaling the continued st…
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The Metric Is Not The Mission: The End Of The Universal Internet
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism o…
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The Metric Is Not The Mission: After The Platform Age
The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism o…
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When the Public Good Is in the Hands of Big Tech
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Many people are understandably focused on the question of how AI will transform our civilization. Will…
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The Real Danger of Big Tech
The biggest risks of AI and other advanced technologies have less to do with their growing power than the men behind them.