Meta has been ordered to pay the US state of New Mexico $25 billion (€22.3 billion) over claims that it misled the public about the privacy of Facebook users’ data. The award is among the largest ever handed down against a company by a single American state.
Judge Francis Mathew, of the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, issued the order on October 21 after a jury found the company liable in September. Jurors concluded that Meta had breached New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times.
State law allows penalties of up to $5,000 for each violation, which produced a theoretical maximum of about $219.4 billion (€195 billion). Mathew used his discretion to cut that to $25 billion, with interest accruing at 15 per cent a year until it is paid in full.
The judge found that the misrepresentations reached the most senior levels of the company, including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. “These communications were part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public,” he wrote.
The case was filed in 2021 and grew out of the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which data harvested through a personality quiz exposed the profiles of some 87 million users and was used for targeted political advertising. New Mexico attorney general Raúl Torrez said the ruling was among the largest state verdicts against a company in American history.
The state had asked the court for between $35 billion and $40 billion. Meta argued it should pay no more than $3.45 billion and told the court that a heavier penalty risked driving business out of New Mexico.
Meta said it would appeal. Chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney described the award as “a tax on speech”.
The company agreed in August to pay up to €15.5 billion to settle child-safety claims brought by a coalition of state attorneys general, a deal that left the New Mexico case untouched. Money recovered under New Mexico consumer protection law goes to the state education fund.
In Brussels, the European Commission has charged Meta under the Digital Services Act over the allegedly addictive design of Facebook and Instagram. It also fined the company €200 million in April 2025 under the Digital Markets Act over its “pay or consent” advertising model.
Ireland’s data protection authority imposed a €1.2 billion penalty on Meta in 2023 for transferring European Union user data to the United States, still the heaviest fine issued under the bloc’s data protection rules. The combined total of those European actions remains a fraction of what a single American state court has now demanded in one judgment.
