Judge Francis Mathew orders Meta to pay New Mexico $25bn

Jury found 26 of 29 Meta statements misleading

A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25bn on Wednesday after a Santa Fe jury found the company misled consumers in a case arising from allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm involved in Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data from millions of Facebook users without their consent. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said the money would go to the state’s school system.

The source report also included a photograph of Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at a press briefing with Donald Trump at the White House on 29 September 2026. The photograph was credited to Finn Gomez/Getty Images.

Judge Francis Mathew found a penalty of more than $219bn warranted under state law before reducing it to $25bn. The ruling followed a 25 September jury verdict in which jurors found 26 of 29 statements made by Meta and its leadership misleading. Jurors said the company had committed more than 43m violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws, a count based on the Facebook users or New Mexico residents who were in the audience for each misleading statement.

New Mexico had accused Meta of lying to Facebook users in the state about who had access to their data, how the company handles hate speech and misinformation, and other internal policies. The state said Meta knew third parties had broad access to users’ personal data and tolerated hate speech or other harmful content when doing so benefited the company’s bottom line.

New Mexico sued Meta in 2021 after revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. Cambridge Analytica was the British political consulting firm involved in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Meta urged Mathew to cap the penalty at $3.45bn, saying a larger award risked driving businesses out of the state. In court filings, Meta said the evidence showed that Meta did not sell user data and that New Mexico had not proved any consumer was actually misled. A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At a hearing on 1 October, Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, asked Mathew to award the state between $35bn and $40bn, saying that amount would be supported by the US constitution’s due-process protections and the jury’s verdict. “This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money, and the value of its stock price,” McGinn said.

State law permits a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation, and Torrez told reporters that all of the money would go to New Mexico’s school system. In his order, Mathew wrote: “Facebook’s wrongdoing – over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public – goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”

The current verdict was the second in six months from a Santa Fe jury in the state’s lawsuit against Meta Platforms. In the first trial, which ended in March, a jury found that Meta misled users about young users’ safety on Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and ordered the company to pay $375m in civil penalties.

After a second phase of that earlier trial, a judge directed Meta to pay $567m into a New Mexico fund for teen mental health and ordered the company to implement measures to protect teen Facebook and Instagram users in New Mexico. The latest case concerned statements about data access, misinformation handling and internal policies rather than the young-user safety questions addressed in the earlier trial.