The $25 billion figure is not a settlement and not a fine negotiated in a back room — it is what remains after a judge ran the jury's findings through New Mexico's consumer protection law, watched the total climb past $219 billion, and cut it down to a number he said the record still supported.
A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta Platforms on Wednesday to pay the state $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data, hitting the Facebook owner with one of the largest financial penalties in US history, Reuters reported. First Judicial District Judge Francis J. Mathew issued the order in Santa Fe more than three weeks after the jury's verdict in the case, which stems from allegations that Cambridge Analytica, the British political consulting firm that worked on Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent.
The arithmetic behind the number is what makes it so large. Jurors found in September that Meta and its leadership made 26 misleading statements about data privacy, hate speech and other subjects, and that multiplying those statements by the audiences they reached produced 43,899,725 violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act. The act allows penalties of up to $5,000 per willful violation, which put Meta's maximum exposure at nearly $219.5 billion. Mathew ruled that the maximum per-violation penalty was justified — citing "the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct" and "the involvement of senior Facebook leadership" — but he set the total at $25 billion, and the judgment grows at 15 percent interest a year until it is paid. The state had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion; Meta had urged the judge to cap the penalties at $3.45 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." — Judge Francis J. Mathew, in his order
The case reaches back to the scandal that first put Facebook's data practices on trial in the court of public opinion. New Mexico's attorney general sued Meta in 2021, after revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app and used it for voter profiling and targeting; the firm is now defunct. The lawsuit, filed by then-Attorney General Hector Balderas and taken to trial by his successor, Attorney General Raúl Torrez, accused Meta of lying to New Mexico users about who had access to their data, and of tolerating hate speech and misinformation when it benefited the company's bottom line. The two-week trial featured video deposition testimony from chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, and according to the judge's order, Facebook — after vowing to tell users when apps misused their data — notified users of just two apps out of thousands.
Torrez called the penalty "one of the single largest, if not the largest, single-state verdict against a company in American history," Bloomberg Law reported. "It has been a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable," he told a press conference in Albuquerque, Reuters reported. "I think today's judgment is a clear break with that past and a very clear warning to those in this space and beyond that we intend to protect our people and protect our consumers." Under the state constitution, Unfair Practices Act penalties are dedicated to school construction and other capital projects. The state's lawyer, Randi McGinn, had told the court it should "speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price."
Meta says the fight is far from over. "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," the company's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said in a statement. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." Mahoney said Meta is confident it will prevail on appeal, and in court filings the company argued that it does not sell user data and that New Mexico never proved any consumer was actually misled. Analyst Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson noted that Meta is worth nearly two trillion dollars and will likely appeal the cases and drag them out, Reuters reported.
New Mexico got here by refusing every off-ramp. Meta paid a $5 billion penalty to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 and $725 million to settle a consumer class action in 2022, and six other states settled their Cambridge Analytica lawsuits against the company for $459.2 million as part of a $17.1 billion multistate settlement reached in August — but New Mexico opted out of the coalitions and went to trial alone, as it did earlier this year when it won another $942 million from Meta in a pair of trials over sexual exploitation of young people on its platforms. Wednesday's order hands every state attorney general in the country a template: take a decades-old consumer protection law, apply its per-violation penalty to statements a platform broadcasts to millions of people, and the math does the rest. Whether the $25 billion survives appeal or not, the verdict is the warning Torrez said it was meant to be.