New Mexico has won a $25 billion court order against Meta covering millions of violations of the state's unfair practices law, a ruling that lands as other states, school districts, tribes and individuals weigh whether they settled too cheaply on related claims. A jury found that Meta misled users about how it protected their data and moderated misinformation and hate speech, claims that trace back to the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Most states resolved such claims through a section of the kids online safety settlement, which carried a $459 million payment from Meta. That settlement offered states certainty, an expedited payout even though Meta will pay over 10 years, and product commitments such as restrictions on teen usage that advocates say were implemented soon after approval. Other state attorneys general may also have worked with different laws or evidence that could have produced outcomes different from New Mexico's.
Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney said the company is confident it will prevail on appeal and described New Mexico's lawsuit as an attempt to impose a tax on speech. Daphne Keller, director of platform regulation at the Stanford Program in Law, Science & Technology, said the settling attorneys general may come to regret the claims they waived and may look for remaining claims they did not give up. She said the ruling is encouraging for individuals, school districts and tribes with outstanding claims and could make them hopeful that aggressive litigation leads to a big payout.
Keller said that if even a fraction of the award is upheld, the settling states took pennies on the dollar compared with New Mexico, and that as an attorney general with similar claims she would be less willing to settle or would ask for more. The New Mexico win follows other recent legal victories for attorneys general and private plaintiffs, including a separate judgment of nearly $1 billion against Meta in New Mexico.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, whose state did not join the Meta settlement, wrote on X that the multi-state settlement was a slap on the wrist and that Florida will not sell out to Meta. The District of Columbia did not settle its Cambridge Analytica claims and has continued pursuing its lawsuit in court, which could test whether New Mexico's result can be replicated. Attorneys general who joined the settlement cannot pursue covered claims against Meta but could seek more from other social media defendants including TikTok, YouTube and Snap.
Blake Reid, an associate professor at Colorado Law, described the recent cases as a move toward state-level tech policy, and said the difficulty is that 50 states have different resources, politics, incentives and litigation skill levels while facing the same Meta. Keller said it is not feasible for every case to end with an outcome like New Mexico's, and that Meta would go broke because the multipliers are so large, though any one or 10 or 50 cases could hit the jackpot.
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