SANTA FE, N.M. — Meta Platforms must pay $25 billion in civil penalties under a New Mexico court judgment issued Wednesday, following a jury’s finding that Facebook repeatedly broke the state’s consumer protection law.
District Judge Francis J. Mathew also ordered the company to pay 15% annual interest until it pays the penalty in full. The judgment was filed Oct. 21 in Santa Fe County’s First Judicial District Court. Mathew deferred a decision on injunctive relief until further briefing.
After a 13-day trial, jurors found 43,899,725 willful violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. They examined Facebook’s statements about privacy, third-party access to personal information, misinformation, hate speech and equal enforcement of its rules.
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal but examined a broader pattern of representations about Facebook’s practices. Meta, formerly known as Facebook Inc., operates the platform.
According to the court, the statements found unlawful spanned more than 11 years, from May 2010 through August 2021. The jury calculated violations using the expected New Mexico audience for each statement; the total does not represent nearly 44 million individual users.
Mathew calculated a penalty of $219.5 billion at the statutory maximum of $5,000 for each unfair or deceptive trade practice violation, then reduced the award to $25 billion.
The court found that Facebook continued making public promises despite internal warnings that its practices and systems could not support them. Some statements came from senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and then-Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Among the findings, Facebook allowed favored business partners to retain access to users’ friends’ information after publicly announcing restrictions on that access.
The judgment also examined Facebook’s investigation of developers following the Cambridge Analytica disclosures in March 2018. The court found that the company failed to deliver the comprehensive investigation and user notifications it had promised.
Facebook conducted 14 forensic data audits during the three-year investigation, according to the judgment. The court found that it notified users about misuse involving only two applications despite identifying thousands of applications associated with abusive data practices.
The findings extended to content enforcement. The court described a system called CrossCheck that gave certain prominent accounts additional review, allowing content that violated Facebook’s policies to remain visible while enforcement was delayed.
In its announcement, the New Mexico Department of Justice said the state pursued its claims separately rather than joining a multistate settlement.
“Today’s result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable,” Attorney General Raúl Torrez said.
The supplied materials contain no company statement responding to Wednesday’s penalty. The judgment records that Meta challenged the proportionality of the assessment and defended the case at trial.
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