A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion — the largest penalty ever levied against the company — after a jury found it had spent more than a decade lying to the public about how it handled Facebook user data.
Judge Francis Mathew handed down the fine on Wednesday following a two-week trial earlier this year, finding that Meta's violations of state law were "willful" and spanned "more than 11 years," from 2010 to 2021. Communications between senior executives, including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, were "designed to mislead the public," the judge wrote in his order. "The lies extend beyond Facebook's data practices as well," he said, adding that they went to "the heart of Facebook's core business practices."
Cambridge Analytica's long shadow
New Mexico's lawsuit traced back to Meta's role — then still operating as Facebook — in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the political consultancy harvested data from millions of Facebook users, including work tied to the 2016 US presidential election. State lawyers argued that Meta had repeatedly told the public its user data was never shared with or accessed by third parties without permission, when in reality it had been. New Mexico also accused the company of misleading the public about how it profited from hate speech and how it enforced its own rules against it; the jury found Meta had misled the public on that count too.
Lawyers for the state said Meta's dishonesty had touched the entire population of New Mexico — roughly two million people — and the jury found more than 40 million separate violations of state law. The full penalty implied by that count, calculated at $219 billion, was reduced by Judge Mathew to $25 billion, an amount he set roughly equal to Meta's quarterly profit. State prosecutors had sought up to $40 billion; Meta had argued that anything beyond $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional.
"For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said. "Today's result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable."
Meta vows to appeal
Meta's head lawyer, CJ Mahoney, called the ruling "all but impossible" to reconcile with doing business in New Mexico and said the company intends to appeal — a move he predicted will succeed. Meta separately argued the lawsuit was effectively "a tax on speech" aimed at rewriting the rules for what people can say online, a framing state lawyers rejected.
The ruling follows a string of costly legal defeats for Meta this year, including an $18 billion settlement with California over child safety and an earlier $567 million penalty — the largest child-safety ruling against a social media company — in a separate New Mexico case that compared Meta's conduct to that of an industrial polluter. It also follows a $5 billion fine levied by the US Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over Facebook's data privacy practices.
Even so, the fines are dwarfed by Meta's spending on artificial intelligence as it races to compete with rivals such as OpenAI and Google. On a call with analysts, Zuckerberg said the company's consumer AI assistant, Muse, was already used by 10 million people. "Growing Muse to serve billions of people is both our mission and our strategy," he said.
What happens next
Meta's appeal is expected to focus on the constitutionality of the damages figure, setting up a protracted legal fight even as the company books the penalty against its results. New Mexico, meanwhile, has emerged as one of Meta's most persistent legal adversaries, having now extracted more than $25.9 billion in penalties from the company across its two major suits this year alone.
