COURTS
New Mexico jury finds Meta violated consumer law
Judge will decide financial penalty based on millions of violations of state law
SANTA FE — For the second time this year, a New Mexico jury found that Meta Platforms violated a state consumer protection law, in this case by making false promises to protect Facebook users from harmful content and data misuse.
The verdict came Friday following two weeks of testimony in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe before Judge Francis Mathew. Jurors began deliberating Wednesday afternoon after more than four hours of closing arguments.
Jurors were given the task of weighing the truthfulness of 29 statements made by Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, and deciding whether the company violated New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. The law is intended to protect consumers from false, deceptive and “unconscionable” trade practices.
Jurors found that in 26 of those 29 statements, Facebook was “false or deceptive” in their assurances to users about issues ranging from removal of hate speech and misinformation from the platform to users’ ability to control their personal data from use by third parties.
Randi McGinn, New Mexico’s lead attorney in the case, celebrated the verdict as a win for the state and for all users of social media.
“What a great verdict,” McGinn said after Mathew read the verdicts from the bench. “My word to all the social media companies that would not be truthful to New Mexicans is like, ‘Don’t mess with New Mexico.’ ”
Jurors also found Meta responsible for five “unconscionable” trade practices, including failure to notify users that their personal data was accessed by a third-party app developer and Facebook’s failure to remove hate speech and misinformation from the platform.
“Facebook has been lying for 16 years to everybody about protecting their information, all the while stealing all their private thoughts and dreams and hopes,” said McGinn, who was hired by the New Mexico Department of Justice. “It’s about time that somebody stood up to them and I’m just glad it’s New Mexico.”
A spokesperson for Meta responded Friday that the company disagrees with the verdict.
“Meta’s platforms are forums for free expression,” the company said in a statement. “We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community. This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users; information, and giving them control over their data.”
Meta will continue “to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record,” the statement said.
In addition, jurors found that each statement applied to at least 1.4 million New Mexicans — the estimated number of New Mexico Facebook users in 2020.
That number potentially results in tens of millions of individual violations of the Unfair Practices Act, which has a maximum penalty of $5,000 per violation. McGinn estimated the total number of separate violations at 43,899,720.
It’s now up to Mathew to determine how much money Meta must pay New Mexico. Mathew plans to hold hearings to allow the two sides to argue the potential judgement.
McGinn said Meta is almost certain to appeal the case and that New Mexico is unlikely to get a paycheck until the appeal is resolved. “We aren’t going to see the money for four or five years” while the appeal plays out, she said.
McGinn told jurors in closing arguments Wednesday that Meta made false assurances that it would protect the personal data of Facebook users. Instead, she argued, Facebook profited by selling users’ data to third-party app developers.
“They turned our dreams into data that they could sell to advertisers," McGinn told jurors. Meta officials lied when they told Facebook users that their data would not be sold to third-party app developers, she said.
Meta’s attorney, Dane Butswinkas, said in closing arguments this week that New Mexico’s case is based on a data breach that occurred more than a decade ago and doesn’t reflect safeguards Meta implemented in recent years to protect users from data misuse and harmful content.
“We’ve heard a lot of talk about Cambridge Analytica,” Butswinkas told jurors. “That was a sale by an app — a legitimate app, a teacher at Cambridge (University), to Cambridge Analytica in 2014. Here we are in 2026.”
The trial stems from a 2021 lawsuit filed by then-New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas in response to the decade-old Cambridge Analytica data breach scandal.
The suit was part of a wave of data-privacy actions filed by state attorneys general after news broke in 2018 that London-based Cambridge Analytica had used Facebook data for political campaigns. Clients of the now-defunct firm included the 2016 president campaign of President Donald Trump.
The trial marks the third time New Mexico and Meta have faced off in a Santa Fe courtroom this year.
In a 2023 lawsuit filed against Meta Platforms and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Attorney General Raúl Torrez alleged the company failed to protect children from sexual abuse, online solicitation and human trafficking. That lawsuit led to two high-profile trials this year in 1st Judicial District Court in Santa Fe.
On Aug. 6, District Judge Bryan Biedscheid ordered Meta to pay $567 million to help repair harm caused by the company’s platforms. That order followed a jury verdict in March that ordered Meta to pay $375 million in civil penalties to New Mexico for violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.
In August, Meta reached a landmark settlement agreeing to pay $17 billion to 47 states to settle lawsuits alleging harms against children. Within that 130-page settlement was a separate settlement in which Meta agreed to pay nearly $460 million to settle lawsuits filed by 47 states related to Cambridge Analytica.
Meta agreed to make “Cambridge Payments” ranging from about $4 million to Alaska to over $18 million to Massachusetts, the settlement shows. The deal releases Meta from all claims related to Cambridge Analytica, including any future claims.
But New Mexico declined to join the multistate settlement and instead has followed its own path in litigation against Meta, including claims related to Cambridge Analytica.
Olivier Uyttebrouck covers the courts and legal affairs. You can reach him at olivier@abqjournal.com.
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