A New Mexico judge ordered Meta on October 21, 2026, to pay the state $25 billion for misleading Facebook users about what the company did with their personal information — a figure large enough that New Mexico's attorney general described it as paying for school construction for centuries.
Judge Francis Mathew set the amount after a Santa Fe jury returned its verdict in September, finding that Meta had deceived residents about data privacy in violation of New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act.
How the number was reached
The jury did not fix a dollar figure. It counted violations: 43 million of them.
Under the state statute, each one can carry up to $5,000, which left Mathew with a theoretical ceiling of roughly $219 billion. New Mexico asked for $35 billion to $40 billion. Meta argued the award should be no more than $3.45 billion. The judge landed between them, closer to the state.
Two features of the order matter as much as the headline number. The award is earmarked for New Mexico's school system rather than the state's general fund, and it accrues 15% annual interest until it is paid — a clock that keeps running through an appeal.
"We may have in fact paid for the construction of schools for the next several hundred years," attorney general Raúl Torrez said. He framed the ruling against a decade in which privacy cases rarely produced consequences at this scale, calling it "a clear break with that past."
Randi McGinn, who argued the case for the state, said the appeal could take three to five years.
What the case was actually about
The suit grew out of the Cambridge Analytica affair, in which quiz applications on Facebook harvested the data of users and their friends. Data from at least 350,000 New Mexicans was swept up.
But the claims the jury ruled on were narrower than the harvesting itself. Filed in 2021, the case turned on what Facebook told its own users — its public statements about how their data was handled, what its privacy settings actually did, and how it moderated content. The question put to the jury was not whether the data left the platform, but whether the company's account of its own practices was true.
That framing is why the violation count is so high. Each misrepresentation reaching a user is a separate violation under the statute, which is how a state of roughly 2.1 million people produces 43 million of them.
Meta's response
Meta said it will appeal and that it is "confident we will prevail on appeal."
C.J. Mahoney, the company's chief legal officer, called the penalty "a tax on speech" and said the ruling, together with the attorney general's broader enforcement posture, makes it "all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico." The company repeated an earlier suggestion that it could withdraw its products from the state.
That threat is worth reading carefully. Meta does not sell a subscription in New Mexico; it sells advertising against the attention of users there. Pulling out would forfeit that revenue to avoid a judgment it is already appealing — which is a negotiating position more than a plan.
The award is also, for now, a number on paper. Meta reported $64.6 billion in revenue in its most recent quarter, so $25 billion is within reach of its balance sheet, but nothing is collected while the appeal runs. What accumulates in the meantime is the interest.
Reporting from KOB 4 and Engadget.
