ALBUQUERQUE, October 22, 2026 — Under the hood, the technical reality of software development often collides with hard legal liabilities, and Meta now faces a record penalty for how it handled user information. A judge ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for deceiving users about privacy and content moderation on Facebook, according to Reuters and CBS News.
The Verdict And The Cambridge Analytica Roots
Judge Francis Mathew handed down the amount, which New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described as one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history, according to ABC News. Meta was found liable for over 43 million violations of New Mexico consumer protection laws, according to ABC News. As ever, the detail that matters goes back to the roots of the platform. The case stemmed from allegations that Facebook deceived users about a data breach stemming from a third-party personality quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million profiles and sold it to a political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, to generate targeted ads, according to CBS News and Yahoo Finance.
According to CBS News, the jury found that the company’s most senior leadership, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, made misrepresentations about the service’s data privacy policies. Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order that these communications were part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public, according to CBS News. New Mexico’s attorney general had sued Meta in 2021 following revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting, according to Yahoo Finance. While forty-eight other states settled with Facebook in a nationwide case, New Mexico chose to take the social media company to court on its own, according to ABC News.
Financial Impact And State Education Spending
Attorneys for New Mexico had sought $35 billion to $40 billion, arguing that the company would only change its ways with a sum that affected its stock price, according to ABC News. Judge Mathew found that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted based on state law, but he reduced the figure to $25 billion, according to Yahoo Finance. Lawyers for Meta argued for paying no more than $3.4 billion, stating that an award ten times that or even more would violate due process, be unconstitutional, and not hold up under appeal, according to ABC News. Meta attorney Matt Nicholson argued in court that a sum as high as $40 billion would be shocking to the conscience, according to ABC News.
Under the New Mexico Constitution, fines for violations of consumer protection laws go toward state education spending, according to ABC News. Attorney General Raúl Torrez said at a news conference that the state may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years, while acknowledging that the money would be tied up if Meta appeals as expected, according to ABC News. The penalty is the largest levied against the tech giant in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, according to Yahoo Finance. In 2019, the company was hit with a $5 billion penalty by the US Federal Trade Commission stemming from the same scandal, according to Yahoo Finance.
Appeals And Future Developments
C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement that the company is confident it will prevail on appeal, according to CBS News and Yahoo Finance. Mahoney stated that the ruling and the attorney general’s approach to the enforcement make it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico, adding that the lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online, according to CBS News and Yahoo Finance. Representatives for Meta didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment about the amount, according to ABC News. The Menlo Park, California-based company was scheduled to report its quarterly earnings Wednesday afternoon, and its shares were trading two percent higher following the penalty announcement, according to ABC News and CBS News.
Sources
- Meta ordered to pay $25 billion for deceiving users about privacy on Facebook
- Meta ordered to pay $25 billion to New Mexico for misleading consumers about data privacy
- Meta ordered to pay $25 billion to New Mexico after jury finds company misled consumers about data privacy
Photo: Anurag R Dubey (CC BY-SA 4.0)
