New Mexico has requested $35 billion to $40 billion in civil penalties from Meta Platforms Inc. The request has sparked a debate over whether it is a necessary deterrent against corporate deception or simply an excessive punishment.
Last month, a jury ruled that Meta has violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act about 43 million times by making 26 misleading statements over more than a decade about how Facebook handled users’ personal data. According to the law, each violation carries a maximum penalty of $5,000, potentially reaching roughly $219 billion.
On Thursday, State Attorney Randi McGinn, however, asked District Judge Francis Mathew to begin with the maximum penalty and reduce it to between $35 billion and $40 billion. She cited due process limits and constitutional bans on excessive fines.
The amount, McGinn argued, would still be the largest civil penalty in U.S. history and would send a clear message to other tech giants.
That amount is not only fair, but “it would serve the purpose of deterrence not just for Meta but for any big company that would lie to the people of New Mexico,” McGinn told the court. “The world is watching us … and I think somebody has to stand up to these tech titans who think they are bulletproof,” she stressed.
Meta attorney Matthew Nicholson rejected the request, describing it as disproportionate to any proven harm. He considered the tens-of-billions-dollar award “surreal, shocking to the conscience and unconstitutional” and “grossly disproportionate.”
“The [Unfair Practices Act] exists to promote free and fair markets for consumers so they can buy goods and services,” Nicholson said. “Awarding tens of billions in statutory penalties would destroy those very markets by chilling businesses, driving them out of state for fear that they too might face such awards that would hurt the very consumers the [act] is intended to protect.”
The case grew out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from millions of Facebook users was harvested without consent and used for political advertising before the 2016 election. The jury calculated the number of violations in part by multiplying the misleading statements by New Mexico’s population or by the estimated number of Facebook users in the state.
Nicholson urged the judge to impose a much lower fine based on a narrower set of violations limited to actual users, rather than broader population counts.
Mathew has not yet ruled and is expected to issue a decision in the coming weeks.
The request follows New Mexico’s earlier courtroom victory against Meta this year over youth safety claims, which produced $375 million in civil penalties and an additional $567 million to address mental health harms.
Both cases are likely to face years of appeals.
