A New Mexico judge ordered Meta Platforms to pay $25 billion to the state on Wednesday, weeks after a jury found the social-media company misled users about its data-privacy practices. The state called it one of the largest verdicts in U.S. history.
The decision came down hours before Meta is scheduled to report its third-quarter financial results.
The jury found Meta liable last month for violating New Mexico's unfair practices law. It determined that the company deceived users about data privacy, its efforts to fight hate speech and misinformation and its handling of a third-party app tied to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica data breach, where a consulting firm harvested tens of millions of Facebook users' data without their consent.
"The harm in this matter is difficult to overstate, and goes to the heart of Facebook's basic business proposition," Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his order. "To induce users to provide their personal information to Facebook, Facebook made many false promises respecting the security and control of that data over the course of more than a decade."
A representative for Meta didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Under the New Mexico law, the maximum penalty is $5,000 per violation. The jury found about 44 million violations tied to company public statements made over more than a decade, including those by Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg.
"The violations the jury found were not the product of a single mistake statement or isolated incident," Mathew said.
New Mexico urged the judge at a hearing earlier this month to assign a penalty of $35 billion to $40 billion -- far lower than the maximum, but it still would have been the largest judgment in history. Previously, the state said it wouldn't ask for more than $62 billion.
The judge said the state as a matter of law was entitled to the maximum penalty, which would be more than $200 billion. Courts, however, have discretion to set amounts that they deem to be fair and appropriate.
"The court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money and the value of its stock price," said Randi McGinn, the state's lawyer. She said her suggestion to lower the total would help prevent constitutional concerns of excessive fines and due process on appeal.
Meta's lawyer Matt Nicholson said at the hearing that the state's penalty request was "blatantly unconstitutional" and "wildly out of proportion," dwarfing the $20.8 billion in settlement tied to the 2016 BP Deepwater Horizon spill.
Nicholson said there was no evidence that any New Mexican was harmed by the company's actions and said the penalty should be closer to the range of $345 million to $3.5 billion. He added that even those numbers were problematic but would at least "lessen the extreme aberration the state's proposition would create."
The New Mexico lawsuit, filed in 2021, alleged that the Cambridge Analytica scandal reflected a broader pattern of misleading consumers about privacy practices, content moderation and the misuse of data. The state will also ask the judge to require Meta to make changes to its platforms based on the jury's verdict in later proceedings.
New Mexico opted out of a broader multistate settlement with Meta earlier this year that ended similar lawsuits. The $17 billion agreement reached with 48 states centered on social-media-addiction claims, but it also ended the states' consumer-protection claims related to Cambridge for $459 million. California settled its case for $50 million last year.
This is the second verdict New Mexico won against Meta this year. Another state judge ordered the company to pay $942 million in August, after it lost a trial over whether its platform protected young people from online predators and caused mental-health issues. Meta said it would appeal the child-safety ruling.