New Mexico Judge Orders Meta to Pay $25 Billion Over Facebook Privacy Claims

A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found that Facebook spent years misleading users about their privacy and how the company handled their data.

Judge Francis J. Mathew of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County entered the penalty in a 20-page judgment. The order first awards the state $219,498,600,000, then reduces that amount to $25 billion. Interest will accrue at 15% a year until Meta pays.

The larger figure is the maximum the law allows. New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, under § 57-12-11, permits a civil penalty of up to $5,000 per violation, and a jury found in late September that Facebook committed 43,899,720 willful violations of the act through unfair or deceptive trade practices. Mathew wrote that the trial record supported the highest level of penalty allowed, then cut the award without explaining how he reached $25 billion.

The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal of 2018, in which data from millions of Facebook users was obtained through a third-party personality quiz app and passed to a political consulting firm that worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Attorney General Raúl Torrez's office sued in 2021.

Jurors found 26 public statements by Facebook to be unlawful and willful. They covered users' ability to control their data, the company's promise to investigate app developers after Cambridge Analytica, and its claims about fighting hate speech and misinformation and enforcing its rules equally. The statements were made from May 2010 to August 2021 through the company's own platform, earnings calls and media interviews, and some came from Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.

To count violations, the jury treated each New Mexican in a statement's expected audience as a separate violation. Depending on the statement, that meant either the 1,386,648 New Mexicans who used Facebook each month as of mid-2020 or the state's population of about 2.1 million.

Mathew pointed to the extraordinary number of violations, how long the conduct lasted, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership and the "clearly intentional and systematic nature" of the company's repeated misstatements. He wrote that Facebook's misrepresentations about users' control of their data "were not isolated incidents, but rather a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model."

The judge also addressed the company's promised review of app developers after the scandal. He found that over three years Facebook conducted only 14 forensic data audits, notified users about only two apps out of thousands found to be misusing data, and generally relied on developers to certify that they had deleted data rather than checking.

"For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," Torrez said. "A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million violations of our consumer protection statute, and this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences."

State lawyers had sought $35 billion to $40 billion. Meta's lawyers argued the company should pay no more than $3.4 billion and that a much larger award would violate due process. Meta also cited its $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019. Mathew wrote that the FTC settlement "cannot be viewed in a vacuum" and must be weighed with the agency's full docket, including later litigation over violations. "Penalties, consent agreements and decrees have not deterred Meta" from deceptive practices aimed at New Mexicans, he wrote.

Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the company would 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."

The judgment leaves one question open. Mathew reserved a decision on injunctive relief, which could require changes to how Meta operates in the state, pending further briefing.

The order adds to a difficult year for Meta in New Mexico courts. In March a Santa Fe jury imposed a $375 million civil penalty in a separate child-safety case brought by the state, and in August a judge ordered Meta to pay another $567 million to address youth mental health and imposed five years of court-supervised changes to Facebook and Instagram, bringing that case to $942 million.

For investors, the $25 billion figure is roughly an eighth of the $201 billion in revenue Meta posted for 2025.