A New Mexico judge calculated $219.5 billion from the jury’s violation count, then reduced the civil penalty to $25 billion. Meta disputes how those violations were counted and says it will appeal.
Meta, which operates Facebook, faces a $25 billion New Mexico judgment after a judge calculated $219.5 billion from a jury’s finding of deceptive trade practices. The court found CEO Mark Zuckerberg outlined a plan for changing users’ privacy settings without them noticing: “Give them a chance to change their privacy settings but obviously don’t encourage it.” On October 21, District Judge Francis J. Mathew of New Mexico’s First Judicial District Court entered the written judgment after a jury trial over Facebook’s public promises. The court used the jury’s expected-audience count for 26 unlawful and willful statements to calculate the penalty, then ordered 15% annual interest; Meta says it will appeal.
Meta’s lawyers contested the count and the sum. At an October 1 hearing, Meta attorney Matt Nicholson argued that the jury had not found any New Mexican saw or was harmed by the statements, the Associated Press reported. AP said Meta’s lawyers urged a penalty no higher than $3.4 billion. Trial video service Courtroom View Network reported that Meta said it would appeal and claimed the lawsuit sought to tax free speech.
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The count began with 26 public representations the jury found unlawful and willful. They concerned users’ control of their data, third-party access, Facebook’s investigation of data misuse, misinformation, hate speech, and whether Facebook applied its rules equally. The statements spanned more than 11 years, according to the court’s findings of fact. They appeared on Facebook, in its newsroom, on earnings calls, and in interviews and public conferences.
For each statement, the jury counted the people in its expected or reasonably anticipated New Mexico audience. Depending on the statement, the jury assigned either 1,386,648 violations, Facebook’s monthly active users in the state at one measured point, or 2.1 million, approximately the state’s population. It found 43,899,720 willful unfair or deceptive trade practice violations by that method. Five further willful unconscionable trade practice findings brought the jury’s total to 43,899,725. The judge used the **43,899,720** figure for his penalty calculation.
Nicholson’s objection, as AP reported it, was that an expected audience is not a finding that anyone actually heard or saw a particular statement or suffered harm. The court’s judgment rests on the jury’s count of people each statement could reasonably have reached. It is not a count of 43.9 million distinct New Mexicans.
The Associated Press traced the case to a third-party personality quiz that harvested data from roughly 87 million Facebook profiles and sold it to political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The trial record examined what Facebook told users about their data before and after that scandal.
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Judge Mathew found that Facebook promised to restrict applications’ access to users’ friends’ information while preserving undisclosed exceptions for favored business partners. After the Cambridge Analytica revelations, the court found, Facebook promised to investigate applications with access to large amounts of user data, audit suspicious activity, secure deletion of misused data, and notify affected users. The order says Facebook conducted 14 forensic data audits over its three-year investigation and notified users about misuse involving only two applications, despite identifying thousands of applications with data misuse.
The Zuckerberg quote sat alongside those findings. Mathew described Facebook’s representations about users’ control of their data as “a systematic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook’s business model.” Meta’s lawyers maintain that the state’s audience count and resulting penalty cannot stand.
Courtroom View Network reported that former Attorney General Hector Balderas filed the case in 2021; Attorney General Raúl Torrez now brings it for New Mexico. The state’s trial counsel, DiCello Levitt, reported that the jury returned its verdict on September 25. The state then sought $35 billion to $40 billion, while Meta argued for no more than $3.4 billion, according to AP. Mathew chose a figure between those positions.
New Mexico law allows a civil penalty of up to $5,000 for each violation the jury found. In the court’s conclusions of law, Mathew selected that maximum rate. Multiplying $5,000 by 43,899,720 produced $219,498,600,000. The judgment then reduced the penalty to **$25 billion**. That is the amount the order directs New Mexico to recover, with interest accruing at 15% a year until it is paid. **Analysis:** this is per-violation penalty stacking: the jury counted a violation for each person in the expected New Mexico audience for each of 26 statements it found unlawful and willful, and the court applied $5,000 per violation before reducing the penalty to $25 billion.
The two figures tell different parts of the case. The $219.5 billion calculation shows the force of counting an anticipated audience separately for each unlawful statement. The $25 billion judgment is Meta’s present civil penalty exposure. Both depend on the jury’s findings and the court’s treatment of New Mexico’s consumer protection law, which Meta intends to challenge.
Mathew has reserved New Mexico’s request for an injunction pending further briefing. Meta’s planned appeal leaves the audience count and the penalty in dispute. The judgment has put a price on the 26 statements; the next fight is whether that count, and the $25 billion ordered from it, survive review.
Related: New Mexico verdicts.
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