Terms Apply
Fake Mark & The Clerk
A New Mexico judge fined Meta twenty-five billion dollars for the Cambridge Analytica scandal — after a jury counted forty-three million violations. Ep. 091 takes the call when Meta phones the state’s settlement office to discuss payment options.
Wednesday. New Mexico fines Meta twenty-five billion dollars for the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meta calls to pay.
CLERK: New Mexico Settlement Disbursement Office. How do you want to pay?
MARK: Hi. Love what you do with highways. Do you take ad credits?
CLERK: Check, wire, or money order.
MARK: Counter-offer. Every New Mexican gets Meta Verified. Blue check, lifetime. Basically cleared.
CLERK: That’s not payment. That’s a subscription.
MARK: It’s payment with retention.
CLERK: Sir. The jury found forty-three million violations, at five thousand dollars each.
MARK: Volume discount?
CLERK: The judge already applied it. Two hundred nineteen point five billion. Reduced to twenty-five.
MARK: Great. Can the invoice ship with our new terms attached? They go live October thirtieth. Opening the invoice counts as consent to keep training on it.
CLERK: You want to train on your own fine.
MARK: You want the fine read. This makes reading legal.
CLERK: Interest accrues at fifteen percent annually until paid in full.
MARK: Fifteen percent, forever. Beautiful. Does it auto-renew?
CLERK: It’s a court order. It renews itself.
MARK: Perfect. Where do I send the check?
CLERK: Santa Fe.
MARK: We’ll pull the address from your posts.
Meta says it will prevail on appeal. The interest is accruing.
The Facts Behind It
- On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, New Mexico District Court Judge Francis Mathew ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties in the state’s data privacy case, which stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal (CNBC, Reuters, AP).
- The court filing initially awarded the state $219.5 billion — a September Santa Fe jury found more than 43 million violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act, each carrying a civil penalty of up to $5,000 — and the judge reduced the penalty to $25 billion (CNBC, Reuters).
- Interest on the penalty accrues at 15% annually until it is paid in full. The judge cited “the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct” and “the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements” (CNBC, quoting the order).
- New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez: “For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law” (CNBC).
- Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is “confident” it will “prevail on appeal,” and called the ruling a move that “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and “a tax on speech” (CNBC).
- The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the data of up to 87 million users was improperly accessed. Meta paid $725 million to settle a related class action in 2022, and joined a separate ~$17 billion multistate settlement in August 2026 — but New Mexico was not part of that deal, so its case went to trial in September (CNBC).
- Separately, Meta’s updated business terms taking effect October 30 let the company train AI on user content, drawing a creator backlash (Nieman Lab, Oct 15; The Verge, Oct 17).
- Fiction framing: the “New Mexico Settlement Disbursement Office,” the clerk, and every line of the payment call are invented parody — no such call took place, and Meta has not paid the fine; it is appealing. The real quotes above belong to their actual speakers. The pre-checked consent box, the ad-credit offer and the address-scraping line are jokes, not reporting.