New Mexico Hits Meta With $25bn

This was not a preliminary accusation or a fresh investigation. According to the BBC, the judgment followed a two-week trial and a jury finding that Meta had violated state laws more than 40 million times. Judge Francis Mathew said the company spent years misleading the public about its data practices, and that the misrepresentations went to “the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. New Mexico argued that Meta, then operating as Facebook, repeatedly told users that their data was not shared with or accessed by third parties without permission when in fact it had been. The judge wrote that the violations were “willful” and lasted more than 11 years, from 2010 to 2021. He also said communications between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were “designed to mislead the public.”

The striking number in the ruling is not just the $25 billion penalty but the path to it. The full penalty, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated at $219 billion before Mathew reduced it. New Mexico had sought up to $40 billion. Meta had argued that anything above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional. The final amount still lands at roughly the size of one quarter’s profits, which suggests the court was trying to leave a mark without using the largest figure available to it.

Meta’s head lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling makes it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico” and said the company intends to appeal successfully.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the result showed that “no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable.” For now, that accountability is a state-court judgment tied to a specific finding: that Meta’s public assurances about user data were not true, and that the court was willing to price that deception in the tens of billions.