A judge in New Mexico ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, to pay $25 billion after a jury found that it had misled residents about how it handled their personal data. Judge Francis Mathew issued the order on Wednesday, 21 October, following a two-week trial, according to BBC News and TechCrunch.

The penalty is the largest ever imposed on Meta for its business practices. It rests on a jury finding that the company violated New Mexico's consumer protection law millions of times over more than a decade. Reports put the number of violations at more than 40 million; TechCrunch, citing The New York Times, said the jury found 43 million violations, each carrying a $5,000 penalty. On that arithmetic the raw total would run to about $219 billion, and the judge reduced it to $25 billion.

The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the data breach that became public in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a political consulting firm that obtained information on millions of Facebook users and worked on political campaigns, including Donald Trump's 2016 presidential run. New Mexico argued that Meta, then still trading as Facebook, had told users their data would not be shared with third parties without permission when in fact it had been.

The state also accused the company of misleading the public about how much hate speech appeared on its platforms and how its rules against such content were enforced. The jury accepted those claims as well.

In his written order, Judge Mathew said the misrepresentations were deliberate and lasted from 2010 to 2021. He wrote that the lies went beyond data practices and reached what he described as the heart of Facebook's core business, and that communications between senior executives, including chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, were designed to mislead the public. Lawyers for New Mexico had said the dishonesty affected roughly two million people, close to the state's entire population.

New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez welcomed the decision. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," he said. "Today's result makes clear that no corporation is too powerful to be held accountable." At a press conference he said the money could pay for the construction of schools for the next 100 years.

Meta rejected the finding and confirmed it will appeal. "This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," said the company's chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

The fine is the latest in a series of costly rulings against Meta. The US Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5 billion in 2019 over its privacy practices. This year Meta agreed to an $18 billion settlement with California over child safety, and New Mexico separately fined it almost $1 billion for misleading the public about the safety of its platforms for children. The state had sought up to $40 billion in the privacy case, while Meta argued that any penalty above $3.4 billion would be unconstitutional.

The sum is large, but it is small next to what Meta now spends on artificial intelligence. The company reported revenue of $64.5 billion for July to September, up 26 per cent on a year earlier, and profit of $9.8 billion. It expects to spend between $135 billion and $145 billion this year, mostly on AI projects.

What remains unsettled is whether the $25 billion will ever be paid in full. Meta's appeal will test both the size of the penalty and the legal theory behind it, and the process is likely to take months or longer. No payment schedule has been set, and the company has not said whether it will set aside money for the judgment while the appeal proceeds. The judge's reasoning may also be cited by regulators and courts in other jurisdictions weighing similar claims about how social media companies describe their data practices.

For users of Facebook and Instagram, the ruling does not change how the platforms work. It is a finding about what the company told the public, not a new rule for how apps must be built. The practical effect will depend on the appeal.