A Santa Fe jury decided Facebook broke New Mexico consumer law more than 43 million times, handing the state the largest privacy penalty in U.S. history.
Story Snapshot
- A New Mexico jury found Meta liable for over 43.9 million violations of state consumer-protection law tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
- A judge cut the penalty from a theoretical $219.5 billion down to $25 billion.
- Jurors found 26 of 29 statements by Meta and its leaders were misleading.
- Meta says it will appeal, calling the case an attempt to tax speech rather than protect privacy.
Jury Ties Billions In Penalties To Old Privacy Promises
A jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer-protection law. Jurors decided the company misled state residents about how it collected and protected their personal data. The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a political consulting firm tied to the 2016 Trump campaign pulled data from millions of Facebook users without their permission.
Judge Francis J. Mathew wrote that Facebook’s deception was intentional, not accidental. He said company executives consistently misled users about how the platform actually worked. Jurors reviewed 29 public statements made by Meta and its leaders over the years and found 26 of them misleading, a finding that formed the legal backbone of the entire judgment.
How New Mexico Calculated 43 Million Violations
New Mexico’s law allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation. Using that math, the state’s own filing calculated a possible fine of $219.5 billion based on 43,899,720 violations before Judge Mathew reduced the award down to $25 billion. Courthouse News reported that jurors assigned about 2.1 million violations, roughly New Mexico’s entire population, to each statement that appeared in major news outlets.
That counting method is unusual, and it is one of the main reasons Meta plans to fight the ruling. The gap between the $219.5 billion theoretical total and the final $25 billion award shows just how much discretion a single judge held over the size of the punishment, even after a jury had already decided Meta broke the law.
Meta Pushes Back, Calling The Verdict A Speech Tax
Meta says it will appeal and insists the state never proved any New Mexico resident was actually harmed by its statements. Company lawyers argued it was unprecedented to count violations based on how many people may have simply seen or heard a statement, without evidence that the statement changed anyone’s behavior. Meta’s chief legal officer said the lawsuit “seeks to impose a tax on speech” to control what people can say online.
Meta also maintains it has never sold user data, pointing to founder Mark Zuckerberg’s past public promise that the company “will never sell any of your information to anyone”. When New Mexico earlier sought as much as $40 billion in penalties, Meta called the number “astronomical” and argued a much smaller award, closer to $3.4 billion, was all the evidence could support.
Meta hit with $25 billion penalty for misleading users on privacy
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about its data privacy practices, one of the largest penalties levied against a tech giant, The New York Times reports. The state sued… pic.twitter.com/uIYv2s8WIj
— Rifnote (@viarifnote) October 21, 2026
Meta’s lawyers also argued that any award far above that lower figure would violate due process and could not survive an appeal. That argument sets up the central fight ahead: whether a state can turn a company’s public statements into billions of dollars in penalties, or whether such massive awards cross a constitutional line.
A Pattern Of Privacy Fines Stretching Back Years
This is not Meta’s first massive privacy penalty. The Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion in 2019 over the same Cambridge Analytica fallout, and Meta separately paid $725 million to settle a related class-action lawsuit. Meta also recently settled a roughly $17 billion case with a coalition of state attorneys general over child-safety and mental-health concerns, showing a pattern of enormous, recurring penalties tied to how the company handles user data and public trust.
For everyday Americans on both sides of the political divide, the case taps into a shared frustration: big institutions, whether government or corporate, often seem to operate under different rules than regular people. Whether this $25 billion judgment survives appeal will decide not just Meta’s bill, but how much power states have to punish tech giants for what they tell the public.
Sources:
insiderpaper.com, cnbc.com, apnews.com, abcnews.com, courthousenews.com, techtimes.com, edition.cnn.com, theglobeandmail.com
