The number at the bottom of the jury form is the one lawyers on both sides will study for months. After reviewing 26 public statements by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and other executives, a jury in Santa Fe found on September 25 that Meta Platforms willfully violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act 43,899,720 times.
The verdict covered five categories: how the company handled user data, how it treated misinformation, how it policed hate speech, how it enforced its own community standards, and the promises it made after the Cambridge Analytica scandal about what it would change.
State Attorney General Raul Torrez said his office will seek the maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation, which multiplies out to roughly $219 billion. For scale, that figure exceeds the $196.2 billion in advertising revenue Meta reported for all of last year.
The final amount is not up to the jury. Judge Francis Mathew holds discretion over the penalty, and no hearing has been scheduled. Under state law the money would go into a fund for education. The state has also asked for an injunction, which is where the more consequential fight may lie.
Meta said its platforms function as a forum for free expression and that it holds a First Amendment right to make its own judgments about how to run them. That argument has served the company well in other cases, though it did not prevail here.
The statements the jury reviewed date from 2010 to 2021, a period that includes the company’s rapid growth, the Cambridge Analytica disclosures and the policy changes that followed. Jurors were asked to judge whether the executives’ descriptions of how the platform worked matched how it actually worked.
This is the second time this year that Meta has lost in New Mexico. In March, a jury in a separate case involving teen safety assessed $375 million, and a later phase of the same matter added $567 million. The company has not paid either figure and has posted $1.8 billion in bonds while it appeals.
The earlier cases established the pattern the current suit follows. A state attorney general brings consumer protection claims, a jury hears testimony about what executives told the public, and the remedy is measured by the number of users or the number of violations rather than by demonstrated harm to any individual. That structure produces figures that are politically potent and legally contested.
The First Amendment defense has limits that companies test case by case. Courts have generally protected editorial decisions about what to publish or remove, but they have been less sympathetic when the complaint concerns what a company told users it was doing. The New Mexico case was built around the second category.
An injunction could reach further than any fine. If Judge Mathew orders changes to how Meta enforces its standards or reports on misinformation, the company would be operating under judicial supervision in a state where it has a large user base, and similar orders could follow elsewhere.
The verdict fits a pattern among state attorneys general, who have filed a series of consumer protection actions against large technology platforms in the absence of comprehensive federal privacy legislation. Cases have been brought over data handling, addictive design and advertising practices. Most take years to resolve, and few produce the penalties that the initial claims suggest.
The legal theory has been tested in other states. Consumer protection statutes let attorneys general seek penalties per violation rather than per injured person, a design that makes large totals reachable when a product is used by millions. Courts have sometimes reduced such awards as excessive, citing constitutional limits on punitive damages.
The state’s finding of willfulness is the predicate for the maximum penalty, and Meta’s appeal is expected to target that finding along with the First Amendment question. The violation count itself was built from the number of times the platform’s systems acted, not the number of New Mexico residents affected, which is how the total reached the tens of millions.
Meta has argued that the underlying conduct was lawful, that its disclosures were accurate as written, and that the state is asking a court to govern how a private company moderates speech. Its lawyers are expected to raise those points on appeal, where the tripling or reduction of any penalty and the scope of any injunction will be decided.
For Meta, the immediate cost is legal and reputational rather than financial, since no payment is imminent and the company holds large reserves. The longer-term question is whether an adverse ruling in one state encourages others to file claims with the same structure, and whether a judge in Santa Fe ends up writing rules for how the world’s largest social network operates inside her jurisdiction.
Neither side has said when the penalty phase will begin, and the judge has not indicated how she reads the maximum penalty provision.
