A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion — the largest civil penalty the state has ever secured — after a jury found the company systematically misled consumers about Facebook privacy in a case that traces back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to the Guardian and the Associated Press.
Judge Francis Mathew entered the judgment on Wednesday, October 21, converting a September jury verdict into one of the biggest consumer protection penalties in U.S. history. For more context on this story, see our ongoing artificial intelligence updates.
A Judge's Math: $219 Billion, Cut to $25 Billion
The headline number is actually a reduction. In his order, Mathew found that a penalty exceeding $219 billion was warranted under New Mexico law before he brought the figure down to $25 billion. "Facebook's wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices," the judge wrote, according to the Guardian.
From Cambridge Analytica to a Santa Fe Courtroom
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2021, following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
The state accused Meta of lying to New Mexico users about who had access to their data and about how the company handled hate speech and misinformation on the platform. The state argued the company knew third parties had broad access to users' personal information and tolerated harmful content when doing so served its bottom line.
43 Million Violations
The September 25 jury verdict found that 26 of 29 statements made by Meta and its leadership on those issues were misleading. Jurors determined the company committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law, counting each misleading statement's audience among the state's Facebook users and residents.
State law allows penalties of up to $5,000 per violation and directs the proceeds to New Mexico's school system, Torrez told reporters after the verdict. At an October 1 hearing, the state's attorney Randi McGinn asked the court to award between $35 billion and $40 billion, arguing the figure was consistent with constitutional due process limits. "This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price," McGinn said, per the Guardian.
Meta pushed back hard. In court filings, the company urged Mathew to cap penalties at $3.45 billion, warning that a heavier figure could scare businesses out of the state. Meta argued that the evidence showed it does not sell user data and that New Mexico had failed to prove any consumer was actually misled.
A Pattern, Not an Outlier
The verdict is the second in six months by a Santa Fe jury in a lawsuit brought by the state against Meta. In March, a separate jury found Meta misled users about the safety of young people on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, ordering $375 million in civil penalties.
Meta faces a wave of user-safety litigation across the country, an accumulation of cases that legal observers have described as a "big tobacco moment" for social media platforms, according to the Guardian's reporting.
The Bill Comes Due as Earnings Land
The judgment arrived on the same afternoon Meta reported third-quarter earnings. The company disclosed that net income came in significantly below Wall Street expectations because of a $9.9 billion settlement payment in the United States, the Guardian reported — context that underscores how legal exposure over data and safety practices has become a material line item in Meta's financials.
Appeal Ahead?
The $25 billion figure is unlikely to be the final word. Legal experts told Reuters on October 22 that Meta has a strong chance of getting the penalty slashed on appeal, pointing to the gap between the award and comparable precedents.
Torrez, meanwhile, cast the ruling as a warning to the broader tech and AI industry. "Just the beginning," he said of the judgment, per Politico, signaling that his office intends to keep pursuing companies it believes deceive users about how their data is used.
The ruling also lands amid a broader shift in how states treat platform privacy claims. From Florida's lawsuit against OpenAI to New Mexico's two jury verdicts against Meta this year, attorneys general are increasingly testing consumer protection statutes against the disclosures tech companies make about how user data is handled.
For Meta, the case is a reminder that the data practices of the 2010s continue to generate multi-billion-dollar consequences in the AI era — and that state attorneys general are increasingly willing to test the outer limits of consumer protection law against the world's largest platforms.
Source note: This article is based on reporting by the Guardian, the Associated Press, Reuters, and Politico published October 21–22, 2026.---
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