New Mexico Hits Meta With $25 Billion Judgment Over Facebook Privacy Lies
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company deliberately misled users about how Facebook handled their personal data. It's the largest financial penalty ever handed to the tech giant, and it comes with a judicial rebuke that doesn't mince words.
"Facebook promised users that they controlled their data. This was false," wrote state District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew in his ruling.
The case traces back to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy that harvested data from around 87 million Facebook profiles via a third-party personality quiz and used it to run targeted political ads during the 2016 US election. Meta's now-defunct client list included Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Jurors ruled in September that Meta had committed over 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws through misleading public statements about data practices. At trial, state attorneys pulled up a 2010 Washington Post op-ed in which Mark Zuckerberg wrote: "We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone." That quote aged about as well as you'd expect.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez wasn't shy about the message he wanted to send. "This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley," he said.
Meta, naturally, disagreed. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney called the ruling and the AG's enforcement approach so extreme it makes operating in New Mexico "all but impossible," framing the lawsuit as an unconstitutional tax on speech. The company will appeal.
Markets, for their part, shrugged. Meta shares were up 2% on the day of the announcement. When you're worth $1.8 trillion and pulling in over $200 billion a year in revenue, even a $25 billion judgment gets priced in faster than a morning coffee.
New Mexico had originally sought between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing the only way to change Meta's behaviour was to hit its stock price. Meta's lawyers countered that $3.4 billion was the appropriate ceiling and anything beyond that would be unconstitutional. The judge landed in the middle, though clearly not on Meta's side.
For context, $25 billion works out to roughly $12,000 per New Mexico resident. As Villanova law professor Peter Ormerod noted, that figure is "quite unlike anything else we've seen" given how modest prior Cambridge Analytica settlements were.
The judgment dwarfs the $5 billion fine the FTC levied against Facebook back in 2019, which was itself considered eye-watering at the time. Under New Mexico's constitution, fines from consumer protection violations go to education spending, though don't expect the state to be renovating classrooms anytime soon. Appeals could drag this out for years.
Almost every other US state took a different path. In August, Meta settled a multistate case over teen social media addiction and mental health harms for $18 billion, with stronger child safety commitments attached. New Mexico and Florida both opted out, with New Mexico choosing to pursue its own action independently.
Meta did score a partial win at trial. Jurors rejected the state's claims that Facebook made false statements about removing harmful content, including COVID-19 misinformation. The company also argued its policies have improved significantly since the lawsuit was filed in 2021, claiming it now catches and removes roughly 99% of content that violates its standards. Whether anyone finds that number credible is a separate question.
Nidhi Hegde of the American Economic Liberties Project acknowledged the $25 billion figure is unlikely to fundamentally rattle a company of Meta's scale. But she pointed to something worth watching: Meta has just launched Muse, an AI assistant the company is encouraging users to trust with financial and medical information. Given the track record on display in this case, that pitch deserves scrutiny.