New Mexico jury finds Meta violated state consumer law 43.9 million times; judge to set penalty

A Santa Fe jury handed New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez a sweeping win last week, finding that Meta Platforms willfully deceived state residents 43,899,720 times through public statements by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other executives on data privacy, hate speech, misinformation and the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the statutory maximum of $5,000 per violation, the theoretical bill comes to roughly $219 billion — and the state is now asking a judge to make Meta pay tens of billions of it.

At a penalty hearing in Santa Fe on Tuesday, state attorney Randi McGinn of Montoya Love Curry & Sievers PA asked Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court to apply the full $5,000-per-violation rate but then reduce the total to between $35 billion and $40 billion. She argued the unreduced maximum would invite appellate reversal on due process grounds, but that anything less than a figure that moves markets would be meaningless against a company of Meta's scale.

This court should speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money and its stock price. I'm going to ask you to award an amount that will affect its stock price.— Randi McGinn, attorney for the State of New Mexico

The world is watching this one. I think somebody has to stand up to these tech titans who think they are bullet proof and can do what they want.— Randi McGinn, attorney for the State of New Mexico

Meta's attorney Matthew Nicholson of Williams & Connolly LLP pushed back hard, telling the court that an award in the tens of billions would amount to a constitutional violation and drive legitimate business from New Mexico. He argued the state had presented no evidence that any New Mexico resident had ever seen or heard the statements the jury found deceptive, and no evidence anyone was harmed.

New Mexico's request is surreal, is shocking to the conscious, is unconstitutional.— Matthew Nicholson, attorney for Meta

Judge Mathew appeared skeptical of Meta's position at several points. When Meta's counsel suggested the company's penalty should be scaled to New Mexico's smaller population — pointing to settlements in other jurisdictions — Mathew noted that those were negotiated deals, not trial outcomes. 'When they go to trial, they role the dice,' he said, according to Bloomberg Law. He did not signal how much he would award, and said he would give both sides time to file additional briefs before issuing a ruling within three weeks.

The verdict itself is contained in a 37-page special verdict form returned on September 25, 2026. Rather than posing a single liability question, the form quoted 29 individual statements — each tagged with a speaker, a date and an exhibit number — and asked jurors three things about each: whether the statement was an unfair or deceptive trade practice, whether it was willful, and, if both answers were yes, how many violations it represented. Jurors found for the state on 26 of the 29 statements and on all 10 questions in a separate section on unconscionable trade practices.

Zuckerberg is the speaker in 14 of the 29 statements and accounts for 24,406,536 of the total violations — about 55.6 percent. Sandberg, the former chief operating officer, appears in six statements contributing 11,173,296 violations. Nick Clegg, then the company's global affairs chief, appears twice; Anna Stepanov and Ime Archibong each once; and four statements are attributed to Facebook as a company. The oldest statement dates to May 24, 2010; the newest, from August 16, 2022, was among the three the jury rejected.

Jurors wrote only two figures on the form: 2,100,000 against 11 statements and 1,386,648 against the other 15. Multiplied out, those produce the total of 43,899,720. According to ppc.land's analysis of the verdict form, every statement delivered through an outside news organization — the Washington Post, PBS, Bloomberg Television, CNN, CNBC, CBS, the New York Times, WIRED and interviews with journalist Kara Swisher — carries the higher figure of 2,100,000, consistent with the state's estimate of New Mexico's total population at the time. Every statement delivered through Facebook's own channels — posts, the company Newsroom, earnings calls and the 2014 F8 developer conference — carries 1,386,648, consistent with the state's estimate of New Mexico's Facebook user base. The verdict form states no method; the pattern is an inference from the numbers.

By subject area, the largest share of violations — 18,146,592, or about 41 percent of the total — falls under Part V of the verdict form, which covers Meta's promised investigation of app developers following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. At the statutory maximum, that category alone would produce a penalty of roughly $90.7 billion, according to ppc.land. Part I, covering users' control of their data, accounts for 10,459,944 violations; Part III, covering hate speech, for 7,646,592; Part IV, on the application of Community Standards, for 4,159,944; and Part II, on misinformation, for 3,486,648.

The case, State of New Mexico v. Facebook Inc., No. D-101-CV-202100132, is the second major jury verdict New Mexico has won against Meta this year. Earlier in 2026, a separate jury found Meta liable over claims that Facebook and Instagram harm teen mental health and foster child sexual exploitation, resulting in a $375 million civil penalty and an additional $567 million Meta must pay to fund programs addressing the youth mental health crisis, according to Bloomberg Law.

Even a penalty at the lower end of what the state is seeking would far exceed the sums Meta has previously paid to resolve Cambridge Analytica-related claims: $5 billion to the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, $725 million to settle a consumer class action in 2022, and $459 million this summer to resolve cases brought by 46 states and two territories — a settlement that did not include New Mexico.

Why it matters — If Judge Mathew issues even a fraction of the possible $219 billion penalty, it would be the largest verdict in U.S. legal history and could reshape how tech companies make public claims about data privacy and content moderation.

Sources differ on Whether any New Mexico resident saw or was harmed by the deceptive statements: State presented no evidence any resident saw or heard the statements, and no evidence of harm (news.bloomberglaw.com (Meta's argument)) vs Jury found 43.9 million willful violations, implying it accepted the state's theory that statements reached New Mexico's population and user base (ppc.land)

Reported by abq.news, sourcenm.com, news.bloomberglaw.com, ppc.land, law.com