A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion in penalties after a Santa Fe jury found the company had misled consumers about how it handled user data, the culmination of a yearslong case tracing back to the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal that first exposed how deeply political operatives had mined Facebook users' personal information.
"Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order, which followed a jury verdict last month finding that Meta had violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times through a pattern of deceptive statements about its data practices.
How the Number Was Reached
New Mexico's consumer protection statute allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation, a formula that, applied to the full 43-million-violation count, would have permitted a theoretical maximum of roughly $219 billion. The state had asked Mathew to impose a penalty of between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing in filings that the full statutory maximum would "wave a red flag in the appellate court's face" and risk being struck down on due-process grounds, even as it insisted the final figure needed to "send a message." Meta had urged the judge to cap any penalty at $3.45 billion, with its lawyers describing the state's request as an "astronomical penalty that would obviously violate a host of constitutional provisions." Mathew's $25 billion order lands well below the state's ask but far above Meta's proposed ceiling.
The underlying case centered on allegations that a political consulting firm tied to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Cambridge Analytica, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent through a personality-quiz app that harvested not just quiz-takers' information but that of their friends as well. New Mexico was one of the few states that declined to join a separate, broader multistate settlement — reported at up to $18 billion across 48 states and including roughly $459 million tied specifically to Cambridge Analytica claims — choosing instead to litigate its own case to a jury verdict.
A Costly Week for Meta
The New Mexico judgment lands in the same week Meta has separately disclosed that it would have earned more than $22 billion in additional profit had it not entered into a multistate child-safety settlement strengthening teen protections and parental controls across Instagram and Facebook, underscoring how much of the company's current legal and regulatory overhang is now showing up directly in its financial disclosures. Meta has said it will appeal the New Mexico ruling, and legal analysts expect the case to continue for years through the appellate process, with the possibility that a higher court could reduce or overturn the verdict entirely.
Meta's stock showed only a muted reaction to the ruling, with investors largely having priced in a large penalty since the September jury verdict. The bigger overhang for shareholders, analysts said, remains the company's enormous and growing capital spending commitments tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure, a build-out that dwarfs even a $25 billion legal penalty in scale.
What Comes Next
Meta's appeal is expected to focus heavily on constitutional due-process arguments about the size of the penalty relative to any actual consumer harm, a line of attack that has succeeded in reducing large statutory-damages awards in other cases. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez, whose office brought the case, has described the verdict and judgment as a vindication of the state's decision to go it alone rather than join the multistate settlement, arguing that New Mexico secured a far larger per-capita recovery than it would have under the broader deal. The case is likely to be watched closely by other state attorneys general weighing whether to pursue their own independent litigation against major technology platforms rather than settle collectively.
