Judge cuts Meta penalty in New Mexico to $25 billion from $219 billion

By The Conservative Desk (/journals/conservative-desk)

Judge Francis Mathew of New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court issued his written order on Wednesday, October 21, 2026. He reduced a jury-supported penalty against Meta from more than $219 billion to $25 billion.

The $25 billion figure still stands among the largest single-state civil awards ever entered against a private company. Interest will run at 15 percent a year until the judgment is paid.

On September 25, 2026, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for 43,899,720 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. The statute allows up to $5,000 per violation, a ceiling that produced a theoretical maximum of about $219.5 billion. Mathew set the penalty at roughly $569 per violation, about 11.4 percent of that statutory top. The case is State of New Mexico v. Facebook Inc., No. D-101-CV-202100132.

“Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false,” Mathew wrote. He added that “Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.” Jurors found 26 of 29 statements by the company and its leadership misleading. During the two-week trial they watched video deposition testimony from Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.

The suit was filed in 2021 by then-Attorney General Hector Balderas and carried forward by Attorney General Raúl Torrez. New Mexico linked the claims to the Cambridge Analytica episode, in which data from as many as 87 million Facebook users—50 million in the Washington Examiner’s account—was improperly obtained and used for political targeting, including work connected to the 2016 Trump campaign. The state also alleged deception about content-moderation and hate-speech rules. Mathew wrote that “the lies extend beyond Facebook’s data practices as well.”

On the company’s internal response after the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the judge found that “Facebook did not conduct the comprehensive investigation that it promised.” He described that probe as willfully ineffective, pointing to “pressure from senior executives to keep costs down, lack of adequate enforcement resources, inadequate investigative techniques, and a desire not to create precedent for future investigations.”

“The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, and the clearly intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty,” Mathew wrote.

At an October 1 hearing, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, asked for $35 billion to $40 billion. According to Reuters she 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 asked the judge to cap any award at $3.4 billion to $3.45 billion. In its filings the company argued that a larger sum risked violating constitutional protections of due process and against excessive fines, that New Mexico had not proved any consumer was actually misled or harmed, and that the evidence showed Meta does not sell user data.

After the order, Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal. “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. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”

The state’s argument, stated in its own terms, is that Meta systematically misled New Mexicans about data control and content rules, that senior leadership was involved, and that only a penalty large enough to move the stock price will alter corporate conduct. Fairly met, that claim runs into the structure of the verdict itself. The 43,899,720 violations were not individual, proven injuries. They were built by treating New Mexico residents who formed the audience for public corporate statements as separate statutory offenses. Multiply those audiences by a $5,000 cap and a case about privacy promises and moderation becomes a capital extraction at a scale few state budgets ever see. Under the New Mexico Constitution and state law, consumer-protection fines are directed to education spending. Torrez has said the funds will support schools; he has also acknowledged the money would be tied up if Meta appeals as expected.

Forty-eight other states settled related Cambridge Analytica claims. New Mexico proceeded alone. Meta had already paid a $5 billion federal penalty to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019 over related privacy practices and additional sums in later class-action and multistate resolutions. The question presented by Mathew’s order is whether one state, using a per-audience violation theory and a statutory ceiling never calibrated for platform-scale speech, can convert public statements into a $25 billion judgment while 15 percent interest continues to run.

Torrez held a press conference in Albuquerque after the ruling. He called the award “one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history” and said the judgment should be “a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley.” Reuters quoted him saying it had been “a long time coming holding Big Tech accountable” and that the order was “a very clear warning to those in this space and beyond that we intend to protect our people and protect our consumers.” Fox News headlined that the New Mexico attorney general was warning Big Tech after announcing the $25 billion judgment.

Limited government and the rule of law require that penalties track proven harm and remain within constitutional bounds. Counting every viewer of a public statement as a separate $5,000 offense, then demanding a sum large enough to move a national company’s stock price, turns consumer protection into a revenue engine and public speech into a taxable event. Free enterprise cannot operate if any single state can, by arithmetic alone, render ordinary commercial presence untenable.

Meta is expected to appeal. Until the judgment is paid or set aside, interest accrues at 15 percent a year on the full $25 billion.