New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion in Privacy Case

SANTA FE — A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion on Wednesday, after a jury found the company misled consumers about the privacy of their Facebook data in a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

State District Court Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order that Meta's conduct was so systematic that state law warranted a penalty of more than $219 billion — then reduced the figure to $25 billion, still one of the largest financial penalties ever imposed on a corporation in American history.

"Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Mathew wrote.

The ruling caps a five-year legal battle that began when New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2021, and it landed with unusual force: interest will accrue at 15 percent a year until the penalty is paid — roughly $10 million a day — and state officials said the money would be dedicated to a special state education fund.

A penalty years in the making

In September, jurors in Santa Fe found that Meta had made 26 misleading public statements about data privacy, hate speech and other subjects over more than a decade — many from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg — and that those statements reached so many people they added up to more than 43 million violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act.

New Mexico law allows up to $5,000 per violation, which put Meta's maximum exposure near $219.5 billion. Mathew applied that maximum, writing that the deception was intentional and reached senior leadership, before cutting the award to $25 billion — about $570 per violation.

"Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false," Mathew wrote in his order.

At an October 1 hearing, state attorney Randi McGinn had asked Mathew to award between $35 billion and $40 billion. "This company has lied and lied and lied and lied to all New Mexicans," she said. "This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price."

Meta had urged the judge to cap the penalty near $3.45 billion, arguing the company never sold users' personal data and that the state failed to prove any consumer was actually misled. The jury handed Meta one partial win, rejecting claims that it had lied about removing harmful content, including misinformation about COVID-19.

Cambridge Analytica's long shadow

The case traces to one of the defining scandals of the social-media era. Facebook disclosed in 2018 that a third-party personality-quiz app had harvested the personal information of as many as 87 million Facebook users without their consent — data that flowed to Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, which used it to build voter profiles for targeted ads.

At trial, state attorneys cited a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Zuckerberg wrote, "We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone." Internal evidence told a different story, they argued: the judge's order quotes a private Zuckerberg email about a privacy change that read, "Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don't encourage it."

Mathew found that Facebook kept making its promises after its own employees warned it could not keep them. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the company vowed to tell users when apps misused their data — but notified users about just two apps out of thousands, according to the order. Apps tied to the misuse touched data from at least 1.1 million New Mexicans.

The judge also found that Facebook had promised users control over their information while third-party apps retained broad access, and that the company tolerated hate speech and harmful content when it served the company's bottom line.

"A tax on speech" — Meta vows to appeal

Meta said within hours that it would appeal, and its chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, denounced the ruling in the strongest terms.

"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 in a statement. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

Torrez struck back with his own verdict on the verdict. "Today's result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable," he said in a statement, calling it one of the largest penalties against a corporation in U.S. history. Speaking to reporters, he added: "This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley."

Meta, the technology giant based in Menlo Park, California, is valued at roughly $1.8 trillion and reported more than $200 billion in revenue last year. Its shares rose about 2 percent after Wednesday's announcement; Meta was scheduled to report quarterly earnings later the same day.

What comes next

The $25 billion figure, though vast, is only the opening number in what is likely to be a years-long appeals process — and interest is already ticking at 15 percent a year until Meta pays.

New Mexico pursued the case alone after staying out of an $17.1 billion multistate settlement Meta reached in August with nearly every other state over claims its platforms harmed teenagers' mental health; six states separately settled their Cambridge Analytica claims for $459.2 million as part of that deal. Florida, like New Mexico, declined to join.

The verdict marks the second time in six months a Santa Fe jury has weighed a state lawsuit against Meta: earlier this year, New Mexico won $942 million in two trials over allegations the company facilitated the sexual exploitation of young people on Instagram and Facebook and misled consumers about platform safety. Those trials followed a $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission against Meta in 2019 over Cambridge Analytica.

The penalty also lands amid a broader regulatory squeeze on the industry — the recent DHS order directing federal agencies to strip DeepSeek AI products from government systems over supply-chain concerns shows regulators are no longer treating Big Tech as untouchable. Another child-safety trial against Meta is scheduled to begin next week, meaning the company's legal exposure is still growing.