A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on October 21, 2026 to pay the state $25 billion. In September, a jury found that Meta misled users about the privacy of their data. It counted more than 43 million violations of the state's consumer protection law. Meta says it will appeal.
The ruling landed on the same day Meta reported $64.6 billion in third-quarter revenue. It is one of the largest penalties a single state has won against a tech company.
What the judge decided
Judge Francis Mathew sits in New Mexico's First Judicial District in Santa Fe. State law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation. According to NBC News, which carried Reuters' report, the judge said the law supported a penalty of more than $219 billion. The judge then cut it to $25 billion.
That figure sits between the two sides. Meta had asked for a cap of $3.45 billion in court filings. The state asked for $35 billion to $40 billion at an October 1 hearing, NBC reports, while ABC News gives the upper end as $45 billion.
In the order, Mathew wrote that the case "goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices." Under state law, all of the money goes to New Mexico's schools.
What the case was about
The case goes back to Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign. A personality quiz app, which Facebook allowed on its platform, collected data on about 87 million profiles. That data was later sold to the firm and used to profile and target voters. Cambridge Analytica shut down in 2018.
New Mexico argued that Meta misled users about who could access their data. It also said Meta misled them about how it handled hate speech and misinformation. On September 25, jurors found that 26 of 29 statements by Meta and its leaders were misleading. They counted violations by the audience each statement reached, which is how the total passed 43 million.
Meta told the court that it does not sell user data and that the state never proved any consumer was actually misled. Its lawyers also called the evidence stale. Meta already paid a $5 billion penalty to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over the same scandal.
How both sides responded
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney told ABC News the ruling "makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico." Mahoney added: "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." Mahoney said the company is "confident we will prevail on appeal."
Attorney General Raúl Torrez called it the "single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history." Torrez said the result "should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech."
Collecting may take years. Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told Reuters that Meta "will likely continue to appeal these cases and drag them out."
Meta's second loss in New Mexico this year
This is the second time in six months that a New Mexico jury has ruled against Meta. In March, a Santa Fe jury found that Meta misled users about the safety of young people on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. That case brought $375 million in civil penalties. A judge later directed $567 million into a teen mental health fund and ordered new protections for teen users in the state.
In August, Meta also reached a $17.1 billion settlement over teen mental health claims with a group of states.
What this means for tech companies
The size of this penalty came from how the jury counted. Each misleading statement was multiplied by the number of people who saw it.
- Treat public privacy claims as legal statements. Blog posts, help pages and executive interviews were all part of the case. If a claim about data access is not exactly true, its reach multiplies the risk.
- A federal settlement does not end state exposure. Meta paid the FTC $5 billion in 2019 for the same events. A state court still added $25 billion seven years later.
- Audit what third-party apps can reach. The scandal began with an outside app that Facebook allowed. Platforms with public APIs should check which user data those apps can pull, and make sure their privacy pages say the same thing.
- Expect more state cases. New Mexico has now won twice against Meta in 2026, and Torrez framed the result as a warning to the whole industry.
This article was first published on Tech AI Wire.
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