Published: October 2, 2026 · Last updated: October 2, 2026
TL;DR: New Mexico asked a judge to order Meta to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company violated state consumer protection law over the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Meta wants the number capped at $3.45 billion. A decision is expected later this month.
A New Mexico jury already decided Meta lied to its residents. Now the fight is over how many zeros the punishment gets.
New Mexico originally filed suit against Meta in 2021, accusing the company of misleading users about how it handled their data privacy, a case rooted in the broader Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the British political data firm harvested information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles without consent for political ad targeting. Late last month, a New Mexico jury sided with the state, finding that Meta violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by misleading residents about privacy protections and about how it handles misinformation on the platform.
The jury didn’t just rule broadly against Meta. It went statement by statement. Jurors examined 29 specific claims Meta made and found 26 of them misleading. Multiplied against the number of New Mexico Facebook users exposed to those statements, that produced a finding of 43 million separate violations of the state’s consumer protection law. Under the formula New Mexico’s statute allows, that verdict theoretically opens the door to penalties as high as $219 billion, a number large enough that nobody involved, including the state, expects the final figure to land anywhere near it.
What New Mexico is actually asking for is $35 billion to $40 billion. Meta’s counterargument is that the state never proved any specific resident was actually misled or changed their behavior because of the statements in question, and wants the court to cap total penalties at $3.45 billion instead, a gap of roughly tenfold between the two sides’ positions.
“This 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 attorney in the case.
That’s not subtle, and it’s not meant to be. New Mexico’s legal team is arguing explicitly that a penalty has to be large enough relative to Meta’s scale to function as an actual deterrent rather than a rounding error on a quarterly earnings call. Meta posts revenue in the tens of billions every single quarter, which is exactly the math New Mexico’s number is built to confront.
A judge is expected to rule later this month on where the final figure lands, somewhere between Meta’s $3.45 billion floor and the state’s $40 billion ask, or conceivably outside either number entirely. Whatever the outcome, this case sits alongside years of other Cambridge Analytica-related litigation and an $18 billion nationwide settlement that some states, New Mexico among them, declined to join specifically because they believed the number was too low. This ruling is the clearest sign yet that those states may have been right to hold out.
The 43 million violation figure deserves a second look on its own, since it’s doing most of the heavy lifting in New Mexico’s penalty math. New Mexico’s population sits well under 2.2 million people. The number isn’t counting residents, it’s counting exposures, meaning every time one of the 26 misleading statements reached one Facebook user in the state, that counted as a separate violation under the formula the jury applied. Stack 26 statements against a state’s worth of Facebook users checking their feed repeatedly over years, and the multiplication gets large fast, which is exactly how a lawsuit about one state’s residents produced a theoretical ceiling in the hundreds of billions.
Meta has argued in other venues that per-exposure violation counting produces penalties wildly disconnected from actual harm, and that argument will almost certainly resurface on appeal regardless of what the judge decides this month. For now, the number that matters is whatever figure gets entered as a judgment, and every other state attorney general still weighing whether to pursue a similar case is watching this ruling as the test of what that math can actually produce in court.
Related: A Federal Judge Just Told Publishers Their Google Traffic Was Never Promised to Anyone and OpenAI Fired Three Safety Researchers Over a Leak It Still Won’t Explain.
Bottom Line: The jury already settled whether Meta misled New Mexico residents. What’s left is a number big enough to matter to a trillion-dollar company, and that number is about to get decided by one judge instead of twelve jurors.
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