A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion after a jury found the company made false or misleading statements for years about its data privacy practices, a civil judgment the attorney general called one of the largest state verdicts against a company in American history.
CBS News reported, with contributions from the Associated Press, that Judge Francis Mathew handed down the figure following September jury findings against the Facebook parent. Meta said it will appeal. Shares still rose in Wednesday afternoon trading.
The case sits at the crossroads of consumer-protection enforcement, corporate speech, and how far a single state can push a national platform. New Mexico refused the multi-state settlement path, tried the claims alone, and now holds a judgment large enough to reshape any appeal fight that follows.
In September, the jury found Facebook made false or misleading statements by telling consumers they controlled how their information was shared. Jurors also concluded the company misled consumers by claiming it did not sell or share personal information with advertisers.
Judge Mathew ruled that the company’s most senior leadership, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, made misrepresentations about the service’s data privacy policies.
Mathew wrote that the communications formed a planned course of conduct.
"These communications were part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public."
New Mexico attorneys had sought $35 billion to $40 billion. Meta’s lawyers argued the company should pay no more than $3.4 billion. The judge set the award at $25 billion to the state.
The allegations traced back to a data episode involving a third-party personality quiz that harvested information from roughly 87 million profiles. That material went to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for targeted ads, according to the case history described in the coverage.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission hit Facebook, later rebranded under Meta, with a $5 billion fine over its role in allowing Cambridge Analytica to collect users’ data without consent.
Forty-eight other states settled with Facebook in a nationwide case. New Mexico did not join them. The state took Meta to court on its own under consumer-protection theories and pressed for a verdict large enough, in the attorney general’s telling, to change corporate behavior.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the judgment in sweeping terms at a news conference and in a Wednesday statement. He cast the result as bigger than one firm or one scandal.
"This judgment should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley."
Torrez said the fight “has always been about more than one company or one scandal.” He added a direct test of corporate accountability on personal data.
"It is about whether corporations can mislead consumers about what happens to their personal information without facing meaningful consequences."
He also called the result “one of the largest, if not the single largest state verdict against a company in American history.” Under the New Mexico Constitution, fines for consumer-protection violations go toward state education spending. Torrez said the state “may have paid for the construction of schools for the next 100 years,” while noting the money would remain tied up if Meta appeals, as expected.
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is confident it will “prevail on appeal.” He attacked both the size of the ruling and the attorney general’s enforcement approach.
"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 went further on the legal theory behind the case.
"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."
Meta argued New Mexico failed to prove executives made misleading privacy statements and failed to prove that content moderation practices harmed state residents. The company also contended a larger award would violate due process, would be unconstitutional, and would not hold up on appeal.
Those defenses now move to the appellate lane. Investigators and courts have not, in the public account of this judgment, released a full penalty formula spelling out every multiplier behind the $25 billion figure. The operative public record centers on the jury’s false-statement findings, the leadership misrepresentation finding, and Mathew’s order.
Despite the headline number, Meta shares rose $13.56, or 2%, to $707.81 in Wednesday afternoon trading. Markets often price appeal risk and stay possibilities long before any dollar changes hands.
For New Mexico, the constitutional path sends consumer-protection fines into education accounts if and when money is collected. For Meta, the near-term fight is appellate review of liability findings, the size of the civil penalty, and the company’s due-process objections.
The judgment does not, on the reported record, list a full docket caption, courthouse city, or count-by-count statutory map beyond the consumer-protection posture described by officials and the court. What is locked in for now is simpler: a state jury’s findings on privacy statements, a $25 billion order from Judge Mathew, a promised appeal, and an attorney general selling the result as a message far beyond Albuquerque’s borders.
Appellate judges will need to determine whether the liability findings and the penalty amount survive Meta’s constitutional and evidentiary challenges. They will also need to determine how New Mexico’s decision to litigate alone, rather than take the 48-state settlement route, interacts with the scale of the award.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed in this reporting when any stay might enter or how long collection remains frozen. Meta has said it will fight. Torrez has said the point was consequences sharp enough to be felt in Silicon Valley and, if collected, large enough to fund schools for generations.
That clash is now less about press-conference rhetoric and more about whether a single-state consumer case can force a national platform to pay a historic civil sum for privacy statements a jury labeled false or misleading.
When state power, corporate speech, and eight-figure-plus penalties collide, the appeal is where the Constitution does its real work.
