A Santa Fe district judge calculated a maximum statutory penalty of more than $219 billion, then reduced it to $25 billion, in the New Mexico attorney general’s consumer-protection case over Facebook’s public statements on user privacy, data misuse, misinformation, hate speech and content enforcement.
SANTA FE, N.M. — A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta Platforms Inc. to pay a $25 billion civil penalty after a jury found that the company committed nearly 44 million willful violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act through public statements about Facebook’s privacy controls, its handling of third-party data misuse and its enforcement against misinformation and hate speech.
In findings of fact, conclusions of law and a judgment filed Oct. 21, 2026, in the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe County, District Judge Francis J. Mathew calculated a statutory penalty of $219,498,600,000 based on $5,000 for each of the 43,899,720 unfair or deceptive trade practice violations found by the jury. The court ultimately imposed a $25 billion penalty without explaining how it arrived at the reduced amount, orders interest at 15 percent a year until it is paid and reserves a decision on injunctive relief pending further briefing.
The case, State of New Mexico ex rel. Raúl Torrez, Attorney General v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. D-101-CV-2021-00132, was brought by the state attorney general against the company formerly known as Facebook Inc. It was tried to a 12-person jury under a stipulated order entered Aug. 21, 2025. The judge’s conclusions describe a 13-day trial.
According to the judgment, jurors found 26 public representations made between May 24, 2010, and Aug. 18, 2021, to be unfair or deceptive and willful. The statements fell into five subject areas: users’ control over their data (six statements), access to friends’ data and the company’s post-Cambridge Analytica App Developer Investigation (10), misinformation (two), hate speech (five) and equal application of Facebook’s Community Standards (three). The jury separately found five willful unconscionable trade practices, one in each subject area, for a total of 43,899,725 violations.
The violation count was tied to audience size. Under the court’s instructions, jurors assigned each unlawful statement either 1,386,648 violations — Facebook’s New Mexico monthly active users as of June 30, 2020 — or 2,100,000, the court’s approximate figure for the state’s total population, depending on the statement’s reasonably anticipated audience.
Drawing on trial exhibits and testimony, the judge found that the statements were part of a strategy designed to mislead the public, citing internal messaging materials the company called a “song sheet.” Some of the statements, the court found, were made personally by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and the company kept making them after employees, researchers and senior personnel had internally flagged that Facebook could not deliver on its public promises.
Among the specific findings: Facebook announced in 2014 that it was ending “friend sharing” by third-party apps, but the court found it had already planned undisclosed exemptions for favored business partners. After the Cambridge Analytica revelations in March 2018, Facebook pledged to investigate apps, audit suspicious ones, ban developers that misused data and notify affected users. The judge found that the resulting investigation, which ran from about March 2018 to March 2021, included only 14 forensic audits, and that Facebook notified users about just two apps after narrowing its internal definition of misuse, even though its own review identified at least 2,000 apps tied to misuse that would otherwise have required notice.
On content moderation, the court found that Facebook’s “CrossCheck,” or “XCheck,” system allowed some high-profile accounts’ content to remain visible during additional review, despite public statements that the company’s rules applied equally to everyone. The findings also cite an internal test-user study in which Facebook recommended groups and pages containing known misinformation.
The court quoted a private email it attributed to Zuckerberg stating that users “probably don’t understand their current privacy settings,” and found that the company took advantage of that lack of understanding.
Addressing proportionality, the judgment notes that Meta pointed to its $5 billion settlement with the Federal Trade Commission as a benchmark. The court said that settlement could not be considered apart from the FTC’s broader docket, including later litigation over alleged violations of the agreements, and found that earlier penalties and consent decrees had not deterred the conduct at issue.
The court noted that the U.S. Supreme Court has not held that the Eighth Amendment applies to corporations. Separately, the court cited due process principles permitting states broad discretion in imposing statutory penalties, subject to constitutional limits on excessive or wholly disproportionate penalties. It described the Unfair Practices Act as remedial consumer-protection legislation to be construed liberally and characterized the act’s civil penalty as a civil remedy, even though it also has a deterrent purpose.
Citing the number, duration and willfulness of the violations, the involvement of senior leadership and the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, the judge concluded that the record supported the maximum $5,000-per-violation penalty. The judgment does not set out how the reduced $25 billion figure was calculated. It does cite Meta’s 2025 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which listed gross revenues of about $201 billion and stockholders’ equity of about $217 billion.
The court also found that Facebook had notice of the claims and a full opportunity to defend itself at trial, quoting the court’s own post-verdict remark that the company “did defend vigorously.”
Injunctive relief remains unresolved pending further briefing. The filing does not indicate whether Meta will seek post-trial relief or appeal, and it does not include a response from the company to the ruling.
Read the full judgment: State of New Mexico ex rel. Torrez v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. D-101-CV-2021-00132 — Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment (Oct. 21, 2026)
By The Trial Attorneys Editorial Staff
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