Written by: Haim Ravia, Dotan Hammer
On October 21, 2026, the First Judicial District Court of New Mexico in Santa Fe County entered its Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment in State of New Mexico v. Facebook, Inc., imposing a civil penalty of $25 billion on Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook, Inc.) for violations of the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act. As the New Mexico Department of Justice announced, the historic penalty follows a jury verdict finding nearly 44 million violations of state law.
The case arises from the Cambridge Analytica affair. The State filed suit on January 21, 2021, alleging that Facebook made false, misleading and unconscionable statements and omissions regarding its data practices. According to the State’s allegations, a personality quiz app developed by researcher Aleksandr Kogan was installed by approximately 270,000 users but harvested data on approximately 70 million U.S. users, including nearly 350,000 New Mexicans, because the app could also access data belonging to users’ friends. The data was sold to Cambridge Analytica. The State alleged that Facebook learned of the sale in December 2015, but users were not notified until April 2018, after the matter became public. The State alleged that Facebook misrepresented its data protection policies and the information available to third-party apps, failed to disclose that friends’ apps could access users’ data, failed to notify users when their data was harvested and sold, and failed to disclose that device makers and partners had data access that could override users’ privacy settings. The State also alleged that Facebook represented that its hate speech and misinformation policies applied equally to all, while operating different rules for certain partners.
The trial began on September 8, 2026. On September 25, 2026, the jury found that Facebook had committed 43,899,725 violations of the Unfair Practices Act. The jury found that several categories of statements constituted willful unfair or deceptive trade practices, including statements about users’ control over their data and the buying and selling of data; statements about misinformation and hate speech, including that Facebook does not profit from them; statements about the consistent enforcement of Facebook’s Community Standards; and statements about Facebook’s investigation of third-party apps following Cambridge Analytica. Under the Unfair Practices Act, civil penalties of up to $5,000 may be imposed for each willful violation, with the amount determined by the court in a subsequent phase. The court’s October 21 judgment set the total penalty at $25 billion.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez described the verdict as historic, not only for New Mexico but for every state seeking to hold large technology companies accountable, and stated that companies that lie to New Mexicans about how they use their data will be held accountable.
Click here to read the New Mexico Department of Justice’s announcement, and here to read the court’s Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment.
