Meta ordered to pay New Mexico $25 billion over Facebook privacy claims

A New Mexico state court judge this week ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion, the largest financial penalty ever imposed on the company, after a jury found it had systematically misled Facebook users about how their personal data was collected and shared. The judgment, issued by First Judicial District Judge Francis J. Mathew, closes out a lawsuit New Mexico's attorney general filed in 2018 over the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which a personality-quiz app harvested data from tens of millions of Facebook accounts and passed it to a political consulting firm.

Jurors found in September that Meta had committed more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection law, each tied to a user whose data protections were misrepresented. New Mexico's lawyers had asked the court for a far higher penalty; Meta's attorneys argued for no more than $3.4 billion, calling the state's request "shocking to the conscience." Judge Mathew settled on $25 billion, a sum Meta can review in detail through the case record maintained by the New Mexico judiciary's public court system. Meta shares rose roughly 2 percent the day the figure was announced, as investors had braced for a steeper number.

A settlement New Mexico refused to join

New Mexico pursued its own case rather than accept a separate, nationwide deal Meta struck in August with 51 other attorneys general over child-safety practices on Facebook and Instagram. According to the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, which led that coalition, the settlement was worth up to $17.1 billion and required Meta to verify users' ages, cap minors' daily use of its apps and give parents more control over default settings. Florida likewise declined to join and is pursuing its own claims.

Under New Mexico's constitution, money collected from consumer-protection penalties flows into the state's public education fund, giving the judgment practical stakes for schools even as it remains tied up in appeals. Attorney General Raúl Torrez called the ruling "one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history," and said New Mexico was prepared to litigate rather than settle for a smaller, multistate figure. Meta has said it will appeal, arguing the state never proved that any New Mexico resident actually saw or relied on the privacy statements at issue in the case.

Meta did not immediately address the dollar figure in a statement posted to its corporate newsroom. Legal analysts who spoke to PBS NewsHour said the appeal, which could take years, will likely center on whether the per-violation penalty structure amounts to an unconstitutionally excessive fine, a defense Meta has signaled it intends to raise. Until that process concludes, the $25 billion will sit unpaid and New Mexico's schools will see none of it.