Facebook misled its users. A jury said so, and a judge agreed. On Wednesday, Oct. 21, a New Mexico court handed down the Meta $25 billion fine, the largest penalty the company has ever faced. It is five times bigger than the $5 billion the Federal Trade Commission collected over the same scandal.
Conservatives have plenty of reasons to distrust Big Tech. Even so, a good cause doesn’t justify every punishment. This one deserves a hard look, because the math behind it could someday land on a company much smaller than Meta.
What the Meta $25 Billion Fine Is Really About
The case goes back to 2018. That year, the world learned that the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica had pulled data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez sued in 2021, Reuters reported in an NBC News dispatch.
However, the state went further than the data scandal itself. According to the New Mexico Department of Justice, the lawsuit also challenged Facebook’s claims about its efforts to fight misinformation and hate speech. On Sept. 25, jurors found that 26 of 29 statements by the company and its leaders were misleading, Reuters reported.
Then came the penalty. State law allows up to $5,000 per violation. As a result, the jury’s count of 43,899,725 violations put the maximum above $219 billion. Judge Francis Mathew cut that to $25 billion, still well below the $35 billion to $40 billion the state requested at an Oct. 1 hearing. He also wrote, “Facebook’s wrongdoing — over the course of years and systematically broadcast to the public — goes to the heart of Facebook’s core business practices.”
Where the Money Goes
According to Torrez, state law sends all of the money to New Mexico’s school system. That sounds generous. Still, it means a single courtroom just set the size of a multibillion-dollar education windfall without a vote from the legislature. Schools should be funded by elected lawmakers, not by a damages formula that multiplies every statement by every possible reader.
Facebook Earned the Scrutiny
Let’s be clear about one thing. Lying to customers is not free speech, and it is not a business strategy. Instead, it is fraud, and conservatives have always believed fraud should be punished.
The judge found the misconduct was willful and ran for more than 11 years, from 2010 to 2021, the BBC reported. He also wrote that messages between senior executives, including Mark Zuckerberg, were designed to mislead the public. If those findings hold, Meta deserves real consequences.
Moreover, many conservatives remember how these same platforms treated them. They saw posts throttled, accounts suspended, and stories buried under the banner of fighting misinformation. So there is little sympathy on the right for a company that preached transparency while hiding how it worked.
Why the Meta $25 Billion Fine Goes Too Far
Still, sympathy is not the standard. The Constitution is. The Eighth Amendment bars excessive fines, and the Supreme Court has said a fine cannot be grossly disproportionate to the offense, as Bloomberg Law explained. Meta had already asked the judge to cap any penalty at about $3.45 billion, arguing that a larger award would scare businesses out of the state.
Start with how the violations were counted. The jury didn’t count 44 million harmed people. Rather, it counted the number of state residents, or Facebook users, who could have viewed each misleading statement. Under that logic, a single press release can become millions of offenses overnight. Any business with a website should find that troubling.
Next, look at the subject matter. Part of this case punished Facebook for what it said about policing misinformation and hate speech. Those are slippery categories. Today a progressive attorney general uses them against Meta. Tomorrow another one could use the same theory against a conservative news site or a small online store.
Finally, consider consistency. In 2024, New York’s attorney general won a $464 million penalty against Donald Trump and his companies. A state appeals court later struck it down as unconstitutionally excessive. Conservatives rightly called that case lawfare. The principle doesn’t change just because the defendant is Mark Zuckerberg.
Even the State Saw the Problem
Notably, New Mexico’s own lawyers admitted earlier this month that the maximum fine would be like “waiving a red flag in the appellate court’s face,” Bloomberg Law reported. A Marquette law professor, Michael O’Hear, told the outlet that Meta “at least has a colorable claim” on appeal. Meanwhile, Meta’s top lawyer, CJ Mahoney, said the ruling made it “all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” according to the BBC.
The comparison to earlier penalties also needs to be stated carefully. The new fine is five times the 2019 FTC penalty. It also dwarfs the Cambridge Analytica piece of a larger August deal. Reuters reported that six other states settled their Cambridge Analytica claims for $459.2 million as part of a $17.1 billion multistate settlement over teen mental health claims. A huge state verdict can sit beside those numbers and still be the wrong size.
The Better Path Forward
There is a smarter way to hold Big Tech accountable. Congress could pass a clear national privacy standard with fixed, predictable penalties. That approach would protect families in every state, not just the ones with the most aggressive attorney general.
In addition, predictable rules protect honest companies. A startup can plan around a known penalty schedule. By contrast, it cannot plan around a jury multiplying every statement by the number of residents who might have seen it. Uncertainty like that rewards giants with armies of lawyers and crushes the little guy.
That matters even when the defendant is one of the richest firms in the world. We have already argued, in our coverage of the tech stock sell-off and of data-center electricity bills, that markets and ratepayers should demand receipts from Big Tech. The same instinct applies here. Demand honesty. Demand a lawful penalty. Do not confuse a record number with a just one.
Consequently, the right answer is not to let Meta off the hook. It is to punish deception through the law as written, at a level a reasonable person would call proportionate, and then let the appeals courts check the excess. If the $25 billion figure cannot survive that test, the courts should cut it. If the deception findings stand, Meta should still pay a serious price, just not one that turns every reader of a press release into a separate offense.
Conservatives can hold both thoughts at once. Facebook earned this case. A $25 billion fine from one state still goes too far. The appeals court is the right place to say so, and Congress is the right place to write a better rule so the next case is not a jackpot.
Bloomberg Law also noted that courts are not consistent about how the excessive-fines clause applies, and that the Supreme Court has never clearly said whether a corporation can claim that protection. That uncertainty is not a reason to shrug. It is a reason to be careful with a number this large. If one state can turn a public statement into tens of millions of violations, the next attorney general will try the same model. The check on that model is the Constitution, not a press release from Santa Fe.
So the conservative position is not “Meta did nothing wrong.” It is that punishment should fit the offense, and that a penalty this size should have to survive an appeal. If it does, the company will pay. If it does not, the court will have done its job. Either way, Congress should still write a national rule, so families get protection and businesses get a number they can actually plan around.
Sources
- Reuters / NBC News: New Mexico judge orders Meta to pay $25 billion; 26 of 29 statements misleading; school-fund destination
- New Mexico Department of Justice: press release on the $25 billion Unfair Practices Act penalty
- BBC: Judge finds willful misconduct from 2010 to 2021; Mahoney “all but impossible” quote
- Bloomberg Law: Eighth Amendment / excessive-fines analysis; Trump $464 million comparison; O’Hear comment
