Judge orders Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion in civil penalties after jury verdict over Facebook's public statements

As of 8:28 a.m. ET, Thursday, Oct. 22, 2026

A New Mexico state judge on Wednesday ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a Santa Fe jury found in September that the company had violated the state's Unfair Practices Act, according to the court's judgment.

"The State is awarded and shall recover a civil penalty against Meta in the amount of $219,498,600,000.00, which penalty is reduced to the amount of $25,000,000,000.00," says the 20-page "Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment," signed by District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew and filed at 12:51 p.m. ET (10:51 a.m. Mountain) in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County. "Interest on the penalty shall accrue at the rate of fifteen percent (15%) per annum until paid in full," the order says.

"This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer, said in a statement reported by CNBC. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." Mahoney said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal.

What the order says

The jury found that Meta committed 43,899,720 willful violations of the act through unfair or deceptive trade practices and five willful violations through unconscionable trade practices, for a total of 43,899,725, according to the order. The $219.5 billion figure is the act's maximum of $5,000 multiplied by the 43,899,720 unfair-or-deceptive-practice violations, the order says.

The order says the 26 representations the jury found unlawful and willful span more than 11 years, from May 24, 2010, through Aug. 18, 2021, and include representations made by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. They concerned users' control of their data, third-party data misuse, misinformation, hate speech and equal enforcement of Facebook's rules, according to the order.

For each representation, the jury found either 1,386,648 violations, the number of Facebook's monthly active users in New Mexico as of June 30, 2020, or 2,100,000, the state's approximate population, the order says.

"Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false," Mathew wrote.

The order says that after the Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018, Facebook promised to investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of user data before a 2014 platform change, in what the order calls the App Developer Investigation, or ADI. The order says Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation it promised. "Pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create a precedent for future investigations, led to an ADI that was willfully ineffective," the order says.

"Facebook's wrongdoing—over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public—goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," Mathew wrote.

"The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, and the clearly intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act - $5,000 per violation found by the jury," the judge wrote.

"The Court will reserve on injunctive relief pending further briefing in this matter," the order says.

What the state and Meta said

"This is a historic day for New Mexico and for consumers across the country," Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a release from the New Mexico Department of Justice. "A New Mexico jury found nearly 44 million violations of our consumer protection statute, and this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences."

The department's release said New Mexico pursued its case independently rather than joining a multistate settlement to resolve its claims.

"It has been a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable," Torrez told a press conference in Albuquerque after the ruling, Reuters reported.

In court filings, Meta had urged the judge to cap the penalties at $3.45 billion, saying a higher penalty risked scaring businesses out of the state, Reuters reported. The company said in those filings that it does not sell user data and that New Mexico did not prove that any consumer had actually been misled, according to Reuters. At an Oct. 1 hearing, a lawyer for the state, Randi McGinn, asked the judge to award $35 billion to $40 billion, Reuters reported.

State law directs that all of the penalty money go to New Mexico's school system, Torrez told reporters after the verdict, according to Reuters.

Reuters' analysis of a possible appeal

In an analysis published early Thursday, Reuters reported that Meta is expected to appeal both the underlying jury verdict and the penalty. Torrez said on Wednesday that he expected Meta to appeal the judgment and that the state stood ready to defend its legal position, according to Reuters.

"The most vulnerable basis on appeal is going to be the question about whether a violation is going to count, even in the absence of any proof that a particular person saw one of these misrepresentations or relied on them to their detriment," Peter Ormerod, a law professor at Villanova University, told Reuters.

Daryl Lim, a professor at Penn State Dickinson Law, told Reuters that the size of the penalty on its own does not mean it will be overturned, given the New Mexico law allowing penalties for each willful violation.

Background

New Mexico's attorney general sued Meta in 2021 following revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app, Reuters reported. Cambridge Analytica, now defunct, worked for Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, according to Reuters.

In 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission imposed a $5 billion penalty on the company stemming from the same scandal, Reuters reported.

The September verdict was the second in six months by a Santa Fe jury in a lawsuit brought by New Mexico against Meta, Reuters reported. In March, a Santa Fe jury found that Meta misled users about young users' safety on its platforms and ordered it to pay $375 million in civil penalties, and after a second phase of that trial a judge directed the company to pay $567 million into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health, according to Reuters.

What is not known

The order does not set out how the court arrived at $25 billion after finding that $219.5 billion was supported, and it does not set a schedule for the further briefing on injunctive relief.

Meta's statement does not say when the company will file an appeal.