In April 2018, Mark Zuckerberg sat before Congress and apologized. Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, had harvested the personal data of as many as 87 million Facebook users through a personality quiz. "It was my mistake, and I'm sorry," Zuckerberg told lawmakers.
Eight years later, a New Mexico jury decided what that apology was worth.
On September 25, jurors in Santa Fe found that Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, had committed more than 43 million violations of New Mexico's consumer protection law. They found 26 of the 29 statements the company and its leadership made about privacy were misleading. Among the people who made them, according to the jury's findings, were Zuckerberg himself and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook told users they controlled how their information was shared, and the jury found that was false. Facebook told users it didn't sell or share their personal information with advertisers, and the jury found that was misleading too.
New Mexico law allows a penalty of up to $5,000 per violation. Multiplied out, 43 million violations comes to more than $219 billion, and Judge Francis Mathew wrote that a penalty that size was warranted.
He then cut it to $25 billion, which is still the largest penalty Meta has faced. It's five times the $5 billion the Federal Trade Commission imposed in 2019 over the same scandal, and it comes with 15% annual interest until it's paid.
The judge didn't treat the deception as an accident. He found that it was intentional, that executives consistently misled users about how the platform worked, and that the misconduct "goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices." Meta's communications, he wrote, "were part of a coherent strategy designed to mislead the public."
That's the company that told Congress it was sorry.
Meta had hoped this was behind it. In 2022, it paid $725 million to settle a class action over Cambridge Analytica, and 48 states settled their claims against the company. New Mexico was one of only two states that refused. Instead of taking the deal, it took Meta to trial and put the evidence in front of a jury.
The result was a penalty bigger than any settlement on the table. The state's lawyer, Randi McGinn, told the court it should "speak to Meta in the only language it understands, which is money."
It's Meta's second loss in New Mexico this year. In March, a separate Santa Fe jury found that Meta misled users about the safety of teenagers on its platforms and ordered $375 million in civil penalties. After a second phase of that case, a judge ordered Meta to pay $567 million into a teen mental health fund and add protections for young users.
Meta says it will win on appeal. Its chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, argued that the lawsuit "seeks to impose a tax on speech." The company argued it should pay no more than $3.4 billion and that New Mexico never proved anyone was actually misled. Twelve jurors heard that argument and found more than 43 million violations anyway.
The appeal will take time, and the interest keeps adding up the whole way. Under New Mexico's constitution, every dollar collected goes to the state's schools.
Wall Street barely blinked. Meta's stock rose 2% the day of the ruling, and the company is worth nearly $2 trillion. A $25 billion penalty won't sink Mark Zuckerberg. But Silicon Valley now knows that one state refused the group settlement, and that a jury did the math on Meta's broken promises.
Zuckerberg said he was sorry in 2018. In 2026, a jury found 43 million violations, and a judge found $219 billion in penalties justified before settling on $25 billion.