Law360 (October 21, 2026, 2:25 PM EDT) -- A New Mexico judge ruled Wednesday that Meta must pay $25 billion for the "systematically broadcast" lies the social media giant offered the public regarding its data privacy practices, including in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

After hearing argument on the amount of penalties to award for each of the 43.9 million violations that a jury found last month, Judge Francis Mathew concluded the state is "entitled" to $219.49 billion in penalties, but used his discretion to reduce that amount significantly, as the counsel for the state attorney general, which is the plaintiff, had encouraged him to do.

"The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate, and goes to the heart of Facebook's basic business proposition," the judge said.

"Penalties, consent agreements and decrees have not deterred Meta from using deceptive trade practices in its representations to the citizens of New Mexico," the judge said.

"The violations were not confined to one statement, one speaker, one medium, or one aspect of Facebook's business," he added, and there are "substantial aggravating circumstances."

For example, after Facebook said it would no longer share the data of a user's friends with third-party apps that the user had signed up for — sometimes known as "friend data sharing" or "friend-of-friend sharing" — "Facebook went ahead with its plan to exempt a substantial number of marquee business partners. … These exemptions were not disclosed," the judge noted.

Over its three-year App Developer Investigation, or ADI, Facebook promised widespread scrutiny of third-party app developers but conducted only 14 full audits, the judge added. "Even those 'audits' were known by Facebook to be inadequate," he said.

The judge cited internal communications from numerous high-level workers, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, that were shown to the jury.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez hailed the decision in a statement Wednesday.

"For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law … We took on one of the largest companies in the world because New Mexicans deserve honesty, accountability, and the protection of their personal information," he said.

The deceptive statements at the center of the case spanned from 2010 to 2021 and included remarks made in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a 2010 Washington Post op-ed written by Zuckerberg, the judge said, noting that the large stretch of time contributed to treating the violations with gravity.

The judge acknowledged Meta's argument that the $5 billion it agreed to pay to the FTC long ago was an indication of what was appropriate for a punishment here, but ultimately rejected that argument with his observation that consent decrees have not worked.

The 2012 FTC consent settlement required the company not to violate its privacy practices. The jury heard that in July 2019, the privacy watchdog went public with, and settled, new allegations that Facebook had broken the 2012 decree.

At oral argument Oct. 1 regarding the amount of penalties, New Mexico outside counsel Randi McGinn of McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers said that Meta has appeared "arrogant and unrepentant" since the verdict finding Meta lied willfully in 26 statements about data privacy, hate speech, misinformation and Facebook's outside investigation of third-party app developers after the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

McGinn said in a statement Wednesday, "This court spoke to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price."

The jury found that the 26 statements constituted unfair or deceptive trade practices under New Mexico law, and it found either 1.4 million or 2.1 million violations for each, for a total of 43.9 million violations. The jury also separately found that in the five categories into which the statements were sorted, Facebook committed five counts of unconscionable trade practices under New Mexico law.

The amount of violations multiplied by the maximum $5,000 penalty for each amounts to the $219 billion Judge Mathew said Wednesday he could award.

But McGinn urged the court at the hearing to take a different tack and enshrine a per-violation penalty of $5,000, then "remit" the resulting $219 billion total to something in the neighborhood of $35 billion to $40 billion. That way, in the event an appeals court decided there were some lower number of violations, the judge would still be able to use the $5,000 figure on the new number of violations, McGinn suggested.

Meta argued at the same hearing that a $40 billion verdict would not constitute due process, and would violate that clause of the U.S. Constitution as well as the excessive fines clause.

"The state made absolutely no showing that anyone heard or saw [the statements], relied on them, or was harmed by them in any way," Matthew Nicholson of Williams & Connolly argued. With "the complete absence of any showing of harm, that blows past any conceivably acceptable ratio that has ever been accepted by any court," he said.

"Our statute doesn't require harm," Judge Mathew said to Nicholson.

Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement Wednesday, "This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico. At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal. In the meantime, Meta will continue to build a safe and free platform to connect millions of Americans, grow small businesses, and help the country maintain its competitive edge."

In the verdict, the jury also found that three remaining statements at issue in the case were not misrepresentations.

The friend-sharing policy allowed Cambridge Analytica to harvest the data of 87 million mostly nonconsenting Facebook users, the jury heard. The United Kingdom-based political consulting firm was hired by President Donald Trump's campaign ahead of the 2016 election.

"They found out about it before the [2016] presidential election and they told no one," McGinn said at trial. When the knowledge became public in 2018, Zuckerberg told Congress that Facebook would investigate all third-party app developers, tell users whose information was taken, and shut down abusive developers. The state argued those statements were false and showed the jury evidence of confidential discussions, including with Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, which was hired to oversee the App Developer Investigation.

Meta executive Ime Archibong testified at trial that even though Gibson Dunn found serious flaws in Facebook's ADI, they "weren't experts." The law firm told Facebook it was concerning that Facebook had "No requirement that developers provide statements regarding how Facebook user data will be used (by developers, owners, or third parties)"; that there were "No records of the datasets that apps collect"; and that there was "No use-case explanation for permissions granted to apps."

It was the state's third trial against Meta in seven months. New Mexico won a total of $942 million through a jury trial and subsequent bench trial over the alleged concealment of teen mental health risks. The state did not participate in Meta's recently announced settlement of at least $12 billion and up to $17 billion with most other state attorneys general.

Corban Rhodes of DiCello Levitt, counsel for New Mexico, said in a statement that the trial "was about more than Facebook's broken promises. It was about whether a company of this size and influence could be made to answer for them. Nearly 44 million violations and a $25 billion judgment later, we have our answer. This is a defining moment for consumer protection and privacy."

New Mexico is represented by Randi McGinn of McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers PA, and Corban Rhodes, Adam Levitt, Daniel Schwartz, J. Gordon Bergstresser, Emma Bruder, Rebecca Trickey and Amy Keller of DiCello Levitt.

Meta is represented by Matthew Nicholson, Dane Butswinkas and Heidi Hubbard of Williams & Connolly LLP.

The case is State of New Mexico v. Facebook Inc., case number D-101-CV-202100132, in the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico.

--Editing by Robert Rudinger.

Update: This article has been updated with additional comment and background information.

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