Follow-Up: Judge Orders Meta to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion After Jury Finds More Than 43 Million Consumer Deceptions
A New Mexico judge on October 21 ordered Meta Platforms to pay the state $25 billion, after a jury in Santa Fe found the Facebook parent company had misled consumers on data privacy and other issues. GSM previously reported that the New Mexico Attorney General's office had asked the judge at an October 1 hearing to award $35 billion to $40 billion; the amount ordered is below the state's request but ranks among the largest state verdicts in U.S. history.
According to Reuters, Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order that Facebook's wrongdoing, carried out over years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of the company's core business practices. On September 25, jurors found that 26 of 29 statements by the company and its leadership were misleading and that, counting the audience for each statement, Meta had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law. State law allows up to $5,000 per violation; Mathew calculated that a penalty of more than $219 billion was warranted and reduced the figure to $25 billion.
The case stems from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign harvested data on as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued Meta in 2021, accusing it of lying to New Mexico Facebook users about who had access to their data and how it handled hate speech and misinformation, knowing that third parties had broad access to user data and tolerating harmful content when it benefited the bottom line. Jurors saw video deposition testimony from Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Other states settled their claims over the scandal collectively; New Mexico chose to take the company to court on its own.
Torrez said after the ruling that it was one of the largest, if not the single largest, state verdicts against a company in American history, and that it should send an unambiguous signal to Silicon Valley that New Mexico will continue to hold tech companies accountable. Under the state constitution, such fines go to education spending; Torrez acknowledged the money would be tied up if Meta appeals, as expected. Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement after the ruling that the company is confident it will prevail on appeal, calling the order a decision that "makes it nearly impossible to do business in New Mexico"; Meta had previously said it planned to appeal the September jury verdict. The order came hours before Meta was scheduled to report quarterly earnings that afternoon, with its shares trading about 2% higher following the announcement.
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：位于 Santa Fe 的新墨西哥州议会大厦（Roundhouse），本案在 Santa Fe 审理（资料图）。Ken Lund 摄，CC BY-SA 2.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。Photo: The New Mexico State Capitol (the Roundhouse) in Santa Fe, where the case was tried (file photo). By Ken Lund, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
- 2026-10-01New Mexico Asks Judge to Order Meta to Pay $35-40 Billion
- 2026-10-21Follow-Up: Judge Orders Meta to Pay New Mexico $25 Billion After Jury Finds More Than 43 Million Consumer DeceptionsThis story
