New Mexico asked a judge on October 1 to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion over the way Facebook handled its users’ data, sharpening the stakes in a case a jury has already decided largely in the state’s favor. The request sets up a ruling this month that could shape how much the biggest social-media privacy penalties actually sting.
The request lands on top of a verdict delivered on September 25, when a jury found that Meta had misled consumers about Facebook’s data-privacy practices. Of 29 statements the state put before the jury, 26 were found to be misleading. The state says that conduct added up to more than 43 million violations of its consumer-protection law.
That arithmetic is the engine of the state’s number. New Mexico is asking the judge to apply the maximum penalty across those violations, a figure that dwarfs anything a U.S. court has imposed on a technology company over privacy claims. The state’s attorneys argue that the scale of the conduct justifies the sum, and that a smaller penalty would do little to deter a company that earns tens of billions of dollars a year.
Meta is fighting the number itself. The company’s lawyers called the proposed penalty astronomical and unconstitutional, and asked the judge to cap any award at $3.45 billion, a little over a tenth of what the state wants. Their argument rests on two claims: that New Mexico never proved consumers were actually misled in a way that cost them anything, and that Meta does not sell its users’ data.
The gap between the two figures is the question now before the judge, who has said a ruling will come this month. Both sides agree the jury found the statements misleading. They disagree entirely on what that finding is worth, and the distance between the positions, roughly ten to one, is unusually wide even for a case this contentious.
The case has become a test of how far a single state can push a national platform over privacy. New Mexico has positioned itself as one of the most aggressive state enforcers of consumer-protection law against the tech industry, and the size of its request is meant to carry a signal far beyond its own borders. Other states watching the case will measure their own ambitions against whatever number the judge accepts.
The confrontation is the latest turn in a privacy fight that has run for years. Meta has faced waves of enforcement over how it collects and uses data, and the company has repeatedly argued that consumers understand what they are trading when they sign up for a free service. The New Mexico case is unusual not because of the allegation but because a jury has already ruled on it, which forces the company to argue about the size of the penalty rather than about whether it did anything wrong.
The number itself reflects a deliberate strategy on the state’s part. Rather than seek a single sum, New Mexico built its request from the count of violations the jury’s verdict produced, arguing that each misleading statement to each consumer is a separate offense. That approach turns a vague finding of wrongdoing into a concrete, repeatable calculation, which is exactly what makes it easy for other states to copy.
Meta, for its part, has argued that the state is using a law written for ordinary consumer fraud to punish a company for the way it presents a product used by billions of people. The company’s defense, that it does not sell user data and that no user was shown to have been concretely harmed, is the same line it has used in privacy fights for years, and it carries a specific legal logic: penalties, Meta contends, are meant to repair harm, and the state has not shown any.
The outcome matters because the formula is transferable. If a judge accepts New Mexico’s per-violation math, other states with their own consumer-protection statutes could follow with similarly sized claims, turning a single verdict into a template for litigation across the country. A $40 billion penalty, even one reduced on appeal, would reset the industry’s understanding of what privacy missteps can cost.
A ruling against Meta would not be the last word. The company would almost certainly appeal, and the constitutional questions it has raised about excessive penalties would move to a higher court, where the law on punitive damages has been friendly to corporate defendants for years. What the judge decides this month will determine how real the state’s $40 billion number is, and how long the fight over it runs.
The case began as one more privacy suit against the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. It has grown, through the jury’s verdict and now the state’s penalty request, into a confrontation over what a single finding of misleading conduct should be allowed to cost. The judge’s ruling will be the first concrete answer.
