A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion as a result of a jury verdict delivered on September 25 that found 43,899,725 violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.
Watch out for a lot of places reporting on this as though it's just about a privacy violation. The judgment is based on the giant’s deception regarding its privacy and data handling practices, as well as on “misinformation” and “hate speech” – all the way back to the Cambridge Analytica era.
DiCello Levitt, the state’s outside counsel, said that the judgment represents “the largest commercial judgment in U.S. history.”
Meta says it will appeal the decision.
Judge Francis J. Mathew, of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, in an order signed on October 21, arrived at the figure of $25 billion by first calculating that the maximum allowed under the law would be $5,000 per each of the violations, amounting to $219,498,600,000. He then decided to reduce this to $25 billion, with annual interest of 15%, and left the question of whether to issue an injunction against Meta open for the time being.
The state had asked for $35-40 billion, while Meta tried to cap the damages at $3.45 billion.
The judge wrote in the order that Meta’s communications to the public were “part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public.”
He also noted that “Penalties, consent agreements and decrees have not deterred Meta from using deceptive trade practices.”
Meta’s revenue in 2025 was $200,966,000,000, while in 2019, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) slapped it with a $5 billion fine. In the Cambridge Analytica case, 48 states settled with Meta, but New Mexico chose to go to trial.
The money from the New Mexico judgment will go to the state’s school fund, and Attorney General Raul Torrez said, “We may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years.”
The verdict is based on 26 statements made by Meta between May 24, 2010 and August 18, 2021, including newsroom posts, earnings calls, interviews, and conference appearances by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, among others.
The number of violations was calculated by taking the number of New Mexico Facebook users in 2020 (1,386,648) or the state’s population (2,100,000) and using it as a multiplier for each of the 26 statements. There is no requirement that anyone in New Mexico had to have actually seen or relied on these statements – or that they were harmed in any way by them.
As Meta’s lawyer Matt Nicholson put it, the state “made absolutely no showing that anyone in the state of New Mexico ever saw them, relied on them or were harmed by them in any way.”
The judge’s order reveals that in 2014, Facebook decided to publicly announce the end of “friend sharing” but planned more than a year in advance to exempt from this many of its partners. In a private email, Zuckerberg said that users “probably don’t understand their current privacy settings or care about who sees their updates.” He advised giving them a chance to change their privacy settings “but obviously don’t encourage it.”
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook promised that it would conduct audits and notify users if their data was misused. However, over the next three years, only 14 such audits were carried out, and only users of two apps were notified. The company also redefined what data misuse was, in order to avoid having to inform those affected. It was discovered that over 2,000 apps qualified for the notice that was never sent.
Sandberg in 2018 said that “there were a MILLION developers with access to the data.”
An expert who testified in the case, Dr. Calum Matheson, said that Facebook “sell[s] everything but your name.”
The jury also found two statements on “misinformation,” five on “hate speech” and three on equal enforcement of the rules to be unlawful.
One of them was made by Zuckerberg during a July 30, 2020 earnings call when he said, “We do not profit from misinformation or hate, and we do not want this content on our platforms.”
As evidence, the judge cited internal tests that showed Facebook was recommending “misinformation” groups to users, and the “CrossCheck” program that reviewed posts by VIP accounts, leaving them up for an average of 12 days before taking any action.
The jury was instructed that the First Amendment “does not protect a company from making false or misleading statements when it is engaged in commercial speech."
Meta’s chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said that the lawsuit was “at its core” an attempt “to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online” – and that it “makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico.”
Meanwhile, another New Mexico lawsuit, New Mexico v. Meta, has already produced two awards – $375 million in March and $567 million in August, for a total of $942 million. Meta is now asking for a $1.8 billion bond to be able to pause the execution of the ruling while it appeals.
In the August order, the judge wanted to see improvements in Meta’s AI “age assurance” technology, “a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model” – and for users of unknown age to be treated as under 13 or 18 until they were verified.
In our October 5 article, Reclaim The Net wrote that the verdict in this case set a dangerous precedent of a US state fining a platform for not removing speech fast enough.
The privacy counts in the verdict are well-deserved, given the way the company has treated its users and their data over the years, telling them they were in control while secretly giving their data to “partners” and burying what it found. And while it was making promises to do better, it was also making sure that no one outside the company could verify that.
The speech-related counts, on the other hand, are another matter. The judgment in this case is essentially a per-head fine for not removing content it had promised to remove. It’s a system that rewards removing more, not less, and as such is dangerous.
