A New Mexico jury has found Meta violated the state's Unfair Practices Act and misled residents about their privacy and how the company handles misinformation, Reuters reports. The trial resulted from a 2021 lawsuit filed by the state in response to Meta's Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data harvested from Facebook was used to target political advertising during the 2016 election.

The state's original lawsuit claimed that Meta misrepresented what it let third-party apps do with its data and maintained unclear privacy settings. Meta's lawyers admitted the company had made mistakes but denied it sold users' data or benefited from hate speech. A judge has yet to rule how much Meta will be fined.

Cambridge Analytica scraped information from 50 million Facebook users largely without their consent. Meta has reached multiple settlement agreements in response to Cambridge Analytica in the US, UK and Australia. Most recently, it settled with 47 US states over child safety concerns in an $18 billion settlement that included a $459 million payment to resolve existing Cambridge Analytica lawsuits. New Mexico and Florida declined to participate, allowing this trial to happen.