Meta Hit With a $25 Billion Penalty in New Mexico and Says the State Has Become Impossible to Do Business In

A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion over how it misled residents about their data, turning a scandal from 2018 into what appears to be the largest data privacy penalty ever levied on a Big Tech company. Interest runs at 15% a year until the bill is paid.

Meta's response was unusually sharp. Its chief legal officer says the ruling makes New Mexico "all but impossible" to do business in.

From $219.5 billion to $25 billion

The order showed up in a court filing on Wednesday. It follows a September trial in which a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for misleading state residents about how it collects and safeguards user data and how it keeps harmful information off its services. We covered that jury verdict when it landed.

The jury found more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, each worth up to $5,000. Those findings implied a penalty as high as $219.5 billion, and the filing shows the state was awarded that figure before it was reduced to $25 billion.

The cut was not leniency on the per violation rate. Judge Francis Mathew of the New Mexico District Court chose the maximum $5,000. He pointed to "the extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct," the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, and "the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements," which together, he wrote, "support the highest level of penalty allowed."

The interest clock

The 15% annual interest is what makes this expensive to fight. Meta can appeal, and says it will, but the meter keeps running on a $25 billion principal for as long as the case drags on.

Attorney General Raul Torrez framed it as a statement about power. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," he said, adding that "this penalty order demonstrates that those violations carry real consequences."

Meta calls it a tax on speech

C.J. Mahoney, Meta's chief legal officer, said the company is "confident" it will "prevail on appeal." He went further than the usual statement.

"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," he said. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."

Why New Mexico stood alone

Meta has been paying down its Cambridge Analytica legacy for years. In 2022 it paid $725 million to settle a class action. In August it reached a settlement of nearly $17 billion with a coalition of state attorneys general in a separate federal case on child safety and mental health, which resolved various suits that grew out of the scandal.

New Mexico was not part of that deal. So its case went to a jury in September, and a single state ended up with a number larger than the multistate settlement.

The underlying scandal is old. Political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the data of 87 million users back when the company was still called Facebook. Eight years later, it is still generating bills, and this one is accruing interest every day.

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