By Hamza Faisal
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company deceived users about its privacy practices — one of the largest penalties ever imposed on a technology company in American legal history.
State District Court Judge Francis Mathew handed down the penalty on Wednesday, weeks after jurors found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act. The violations traced back to allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, improperly harvested data from up to 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
$219 billion was on the table
The final figure is only a fraction of what the state could have secured. Under New Mexico law, each violation carried a penalty of up to $5,000 — and with roughly 44 million violations tied to company statements made over more than a decade, including statements by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Mathew found a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted before reducing it to $25 billion.
State lawyers had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing the company would only change its ways if the penalty stung enough to affect its stock price. Meta's lawyers countered that no more than $3.4 billion was appropriate, calling anything far higher "shocking to the conscience" and a violation of due process.
In his order, Mathew wrote that "Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices." New Mexico accused Meta of lying to users about who could access their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies — tolerating harmful content when it benefited the bottom line.
"All but impossible to do business"
Meta said it will appeal. Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the ruling and the attorney general's enforcement approach make it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," arguing the lawsuit seeks to "impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." He added: "We are confident we will prevail on appeal."
State Attorney General Raúl Torrez framed the verdict as a warning to the whole industry. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," Torrez said. The money will flow into a state fund for education, and interest will accrue on the penalty while the appeal plays out.
Notably, 48 other states settled with Facebook in a nationwide case — New Mexico alone chose to take the social media giant to court. Wednesday's decision landed just hours before Meta was scheduled to report its third-quarter earnings, capping a bruising stretch of court losses for the company.
By Hamza Faisal
