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The penalty follows a September jury verdict that identified 26 of 29 Meta statements as misleading and tallied more than 43 million violations based on the audience reached among New Mexico residents, according to Reuters. Judge Francis Mathew determined that a penalty exceeding $219 billion was warranted under state law but reduced the amount to $25 billion in his ruling. The decision marks one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a technology company by a single state, a New York Times report noted.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the judgment one of the largest, if not the single largest, state verdicts against a company in American history during a news conference. “This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley,” Torrez said. State law directs that the penalty money will support New Mexico schools, Torrez added.
The case dates to a 2021 lawsuit that accused Meta of deceiving users about data access following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the political consulting firm obtained information from as many as 87 million Facebook accounts without consent, Bloomberg Law reported. Jurors concluded that statements by senior executives, including Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, formed part of a deliberate effort to mislead the public on privacy and content policies. Judge Mathew wrote that the violations were willful, spanned more than 11 years from 2010 to 2021 and went to the heart of the company’s core business practices.
This latest penalty adds to a series of 2026 legal setbacks for Meta, including an $18 billion settlement with California and participation in a $17.1 billion multistate agreement over harms to teenagers on its platforms, Reuters reported. The company previously paid a $5 billion penalty to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 to resolve similar privacy concerns tied to Cambridge Analytica, according to Statista data. In Europe, Meta has accumulated roughly 2.83 billion euros in GDPR fines since 2021 for data protection failures, a PrivacyTerms.io compilation of regulator decisions shows.
Meta has signaled plans to appeal the New Mexico order, TheWrap reported. The company contended during proceedings that the state failed to demonstrate actual harm to consumers from its public statements. A Meta spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment from several news outlets.
Legal observers have highlighted New Mexico’s strategy of applying consumer protection statutes to hold technology firms accountable in areas once shielded by free speech considerations, according to The New York Times. Vincent Joralemon, director of the Life Sciences Law and Policy Center at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, described the approach as increasingly effective against social media operators. The ruling arrives amid broader regulatory pressure on how platforms handle user data and communicate about their practices.
