A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion for deceiving Facebook users about how their personal data was collected and shared — the largest penalty a court has ever imposed on the company.

The judgment, finalized Oct. 21, follows a September jury verdict that found Meta liable for more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law tied to the Cambridge Analytica data-harvesting scandal, according to reporting carried by the Anchorage Daily News. The presiding judge found that state law could have supported a penalty north of $219 billion, but reduced the final figure to $25 billion.

A gap between the two sides

New Mexico's attorney general had sought between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties; Meta had argued the state's own law capped any award at roughly $3.4 billion, according to coverage from The Daily Record. The $25 billion figure lands well above Meta's position and well below the state's, but still represents a sum large enough to register against the company's bottom line — and a signal, New Mexico officials have argued, that state-level privacy enforcement can carry real teeth even without new federal legislation.

THE LARGEST PENALTY A COURT HAS EVER ORDERED META TO PAY

It's the second New Mexico jury verdict against Meta in roughly six months; a March 2026 case produced a smaller, $375 million penalty tied to child safety on the company's platforms. Taken together, the two cases have made New Mexico an unlikely center of gravity for privacy litigation against the social media giant, years after the original Cambridge Analytica scandal first drew global scrutiny to Facebook's data practices.

Meta's response

Meta has said it expects to prevail on appeal, and the company is widely expected to seek a stay of the judgment while that process plays out — a step that could take the fight well into 2027 or beyond before any money actually changes hands. The ruling lands at an otherwise strong moment financially for the company, which posted $64.6 billion in quarterly revenue in its most recent earnings report, up 26% year over year, even as a separate multibillion-dollar legal charge tied to a related children's-safety settlement weighed on reported profit that same quarter.

What's next

An appeal is all but certain, and legal observers expect the case to work its way through New Mexico's appellate courts over the next year or more. In the meantime, the size of the verdict is likely to embolden other state attorneys general weighing their own privacy claims against major tech platforms, particularly as federal privacy legislation remains stalled in Congress.