A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion.
The lawsuit stemmed from allegations that Meta misled users about their personal information.
The ruling adds to Meta’s legal challenges over privacy and platform safety.
A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion after a jury found the company liable for misleading consumers about the privacy of their personal data on Facebook. The ruling, one of the largest financial penalties against a corporation in US history, follows a jury verdict that found Meta responsible for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws, Reuters reported.
District Court Judge Francis Mathew issued the order on Wednesday, more than three weeks after the jury found Meta liable. The company has rejected the allegations and said it expects to overturn the decision on appeal.
Meta Found Liable For Over 43 Million Violations
The lawsuit was filed in 2021 by New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez following revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting firm, had harvested personal information from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party application. The data was used for voter profiling and targeting, including by clients such as Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The case centred on allegations that Meta misled Facebook users about who could access their personal information and how the platform handled their data.
“Facebook’s wrongdoing, over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public, goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices,” Mathew wrote in his order, according to Reuters.
The September jury verdict identified 26 misleading statements by Meta and its leadership concerning data privacy, hate speech and other matters related to the company’s platforms. By multiplying those statements by their potential audience, jurors determined that the company had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws.
Judge Mathew found that penalties exceeding $219 billion were warranted under state law but reduced the amount to $25 billion. The state had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties, while Meta’s lawyers had urged the court to cap the amount at approximately $3.45 billion, arguing that the state had not established that consumers were actually misled.
The company maintained that the evidence showed it had not sold users’ personal data.
Meta Plans Appeal As Legal Challenges Mount
Meta’s chief legal officer, CJ Mahoney, said the company would challenge the ruling.
“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,” Mahoney said in a statement, as quoted by Reuters.
He also argued that the lawsuit sought to impose restrictions on online speech. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online,” he said.
Torrez welcomed the decision, describing it as a warning to technology companies over consumer protection.
“It has been a long time coming to hold Big Tech accountable,” he said at a press conference in Albuquerque. “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.”
The ruling adds to Meta’s legal challenges over data privacy and the effects of its platforms. In 2019, the company faced a $5 billion penalty imposed by the US Federal Trade Commission over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Meta also faces thousands of lawsuits and pressure from lawmakers over the impact of Facebook and Instagram on teenagers’ mental health. Another trial related to these issues was scheduled to begin the following week, Reuters reported.
Earlier in 2026, New Mexico won $942 million across two trials over claims that Meta facilitated the sexual exploitation of young people on Facebook and Instagram and misled consumers about the platforms’ safety.
Despite the scale of the latest penalty, analyst Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson & Co., said it was unlikely to significantly affect Meta’s overall valuation.
“Meta is worth nearly two trillion dollars, and will likely continue to appeal these cases and drag them out,” Luria said, according to Reuters.
