A Santa Fe judge ordered Meta to pay New Mexico $25 billion for consumer-protection violations tied to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a penalty Meta calls a tax on speech.
Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District of New Mexico handed down the judgment after a jury found the company liable for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection laws. ABC News reported the ruling on October 21, 2026.
The case grew out of Facebook user data that flowed to Cambridge Analytica and later fueled targeted political ads in the 2016 general election. New Mexico sued on its own. Forty-eight other states settled similar claims.
Meta said it will appeal. Its chief legal officer framed the lawsuit as an attempt to police online speech under the banner of consumer law.
Jurors reached their liability finding in September. The state had asked for a penalty between $35 billion and $45 billion. Mathew set the figure at $25 billion.
Breitbart reported that the jury’s violation count, under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, could have supported a far higher number, as much as $219.5 billion at the top end, before the judge set the final award. Mathew pointed to willful conduct and an internal review he described as inadequate.
In the order, the judge wrote that the scale and repetition of the conduct backed the maximum civil penalty.
"[T]he extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct... support the highest level of penalty allowed... $5,000 per violation."
New Mexico’s trial case accused Meta of deceiving users about how much control they had over information on their profiles. Prosecutors also alleged deception about a data breach tied to a third-party personality quiz. That quiz, the state said, pulled data from about 87 million Facebook profiles. The material was later sold to Cambridge Analytica.
Cambridge Analytica went out of business in 2018.
Attorney General Raúl Torrez addressed the judgment at an unrelated news conference on Wednesday. He cast the award as historic and aimed the message at the wider tech industry.
"[It is the] single largest, if not the largest, single state verdict against the company in American history."
Torrez said the state intends to put any money collected into New Mexico’s education fund.
"We intend to do everything in our power to make sure that those resources are eventually delivered to the state of New Mexico for the benefit of its people."
He went further on the industry stakes.
"More importantly, I think today's judgment from a state which, admittedly, is not very big in terms of population, should be a clear warning to everyone in big tech."
Torrez also said trial evidence showed the company “lied to its users, to consumers, and to people all over the world about the extent to which they can control the information that they make available on their social media profiles.”
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney answered the ruling in a statement to ABC News on Wednesday afternoon. He did not say much about the company’s future in the state.
"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 cast the lawsuit as a speech fight dressed up as consumer protection.
"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online."
He said Meta is “confident we will prevail on appeal,” and added that the company will keep running what it called a safe and free platform for users and small businesses while the case continues.
During closing arguments at trial, Meta’s attorneys told the jury the state’s evidence was outdated. They said that after five years of digging, New Mexico had turned up only one other data-breach instance of the kind it highlighted.
The underlying facts reach back a decade. Cambridge Analytica used Facebook user data to build targeted political ads for the 2016 race. Regulators and state lawyers spent years turning that episode into consumer-protection claims. Most states took settlements. New Mexico did not.
That choice produced a single-state judgment large enough to redraw the risk map for any platform that stores user data and runs political or commercial speech. Torrez called it a warning. Mahoney called it a speech tax. The appeal will test which description holds up.
No case caption, docket number, or full statutory breakdown appeared in the available reporting. The precise calendar date of the September jury verdict was not listed either. What is clear is the headline number, the violation count, the state’s education-fund pledge, and Meta’s promise to fight.
When a single state can turn decade-old data practices into a $25 billion speech fight, every company that hosts public debate has reason to watch the appeal, and every voter has reason to ask who really pays.
