New Mexico judge cuts Meta’s penalty from $219.5B to $25B

A New Mexico judge awarded the state $219,498,600,000 from Meta on 21 October, then reduced that figure to $25,000,000,000 in the same sentence. Almost every write-up led with the smaller number. The signed judgment gives no reason for the cut, which erases about 89% of the award on our calculation from the two figures it prints.

Here’s how the larger number is built. The jury found 43,899,720 unfair or deceptive trade practice violations plus five unconscionable ones, for 43,899,725 willful violations in all. District Judge Francis Mathew held that the trial record supported the statutory maximum of $5,000 for each, then multiplied it out. The decree lands at $25 billion with no analysis in between.

The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of the New Mexico audiences reached, and the clearly intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act.

Judge Francis Mathew, Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law and Judgment

That gap between the reasoning and the result is what Meta gets to attack. The order also states that the court “will reserve on injunctive relief pending further briefing in this matter”, so the remedy isn’t finished. The money is the part that got reported. What Facebook has to change in New Mexico hasn’t been decided at all.

Figure	Where it sits in the judgment	What it covers
$219,498,600,000	Conclusion of Law 7	$5,000 multiplied by 43,899,720 violations
$25,000,000,000	Decree 1	The reduced penalty actually ordered
43,899,725	Finding of Fact 3	Total willful violations found by the jury
15% a year	Decree 2	Interest accruing until the penalty is paid in full
$200,966,000,000	Finding of Fact 59	Meta’s 2025 gross revenues, cited from its Form 10-K

The violation count the coverage split on

Business Insider reported that the jury found “nearly 50 million violations”. The judgment says 43,899,725, roughly six million fewer. CNBC and Engadget both used 43 million, and the attorney general’s office called it nearly 44 million.

The findings carry other numbers that no write-up mentioned. Across the three-year App Developer Investigation that Facebook promised after the scandal broke, it ran only 14 forensic audits. It notified users about misuse at two apps, against at least 2,000 the court found should have triggered a notice. Of those, 1,585 were tied to New Mexico accounts and touched at least 1,146,225 New Mexicans.

That last count is more than 80% of Facebook’s New Mexico monthly active users in 2020, which the order puts at 1,386,648. The size of the state is the mechanism, because the jury priced each statement by the audience it was expected to reach. The state had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion, as Engadget reported on 2 October, and Meta argued for no more than $3.45 billion.

Why New Mexico was still in court

The state is here because it skipped the group deal. We covered Meta’s child safety settlement worth up to $18 billion, which bundled the Cambridge Analytica claims of the states that signed. New Mexico didn’t sign, so its own case went to a thirteen-day jury trial instead. For scale, TikTok’s $400 million children’s privacy settlement with the Justice Department is 1.6% of this penalty.

Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney called the lawsuit an attempt “to impose a tax on speech” and said the company expects to prevail on appeal, in a statement to TechCrunch. Interest runs at 15% a year until the penalty is paid off. On $25 billion that’s $3.75 billion a year by our arithmetic, so the delay an appeal buys isn’t free.

Two things decide where this lands. The first is the injunctive relief briefing, since that’s the only route to any change in how Facebook operates in the state. The second is whether Meta’s appeal attacks the $219.5 billion award or the reduction, because an appellate court that reopens the cut can move the number in either direction.