A Santa Fe jury found Friday that Facebook violated New Mexico’s consumer protection law nearly 43.9 million times, and the state never had to prove that a single New Mexican read, relied on, or was harmed by the company’s statements. Jurors were told to count one violation for every state resident who fell inside the “reasonably expected or anticipated audience” of each deceptive statement, a rule that turned each statement’s reach into the multiplier for the penalty count. New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act (UPA) caps penalties at $5,000 per willful violation, a theoretical ceiling near $219.5 billion; Judge Francis Mathew, not the jury, decides how much of it applies.
How the Verdict Form Did the Math
The trial ran from jury selection on Sept. 8 through closing arguments on Sept. 23 in Santa Fe’s First Judicial District Court. Jurors sided with the state, led by Attorney General Raúl Torrez, on 31 of 34 verdict-form questions; trial attorney Randi McGinn said combined questions put the real count at 26 of 29 statements, per KANW’s report on the verdict. Per ppc.land’s breakdown of the form, 11 statements ran in major news outlets, such as a Washington Post op-ed, and were counted at 2,100,000 violations apiece; 15 ran on Facebook’s own channels and were counted at 1,386,648 apiece. The Santa Fe New Mexican reported that the larger figure roughly equals New Mexico’s population and the smaller one is based on the approximate number of Facebook users in the state in 2020.
| Channel | Statements | Violations per statement | Subtotal |
|---|---|---|---|
| Major news outlets (e.g. Washington Post op-ed) | 11 | 2,100,000 | 23,100,000 |
| Facebook’s own channels | 15 | 1,386,648 | 20,799,720 |
| Total | 26 | n/a | 43,899,720 |
What did the New Mexico jury decide?
Jurors found Facebook willfully engaged in unfair or deceptive trade practices, and separately found unconscionable trade practices in every category charged, under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. They sided with the state on 26 of 29 challenged statements across five subjects, from data control to post-Cambridge Analytica promises, with at least 10 jurors agreeing on each question, and put the total at nearly 43.9 million violations. They rejected claims tied to fact-checking and to removing hate-crime posts, graphic violence, and false COVID-19 cures.
The Instruction That Set the Multiplier
Final Jury Instruction 13 put it directly: “In determining the number of violations, you should consider the specific facts and circumstances of the case, including the number of New Mexicans who were part of the reasonably expected or anticipated audience for these representations, and the repetition of the conduct constituting the violation. A separate violation may be found for each New Mexican who was part of the reasonably expected or anticipated audience for these representations.” It went further: “The State is not required to identify individual consumers or prove that any consumer actually viewed, relied on, or was deceived or harmed by Facebook’s misrepresentations or misconduct.”
That’s why claims on the same subject carried different weight depending on where they ran. A 2010 Washington Post op-ed by Mark Zuckerberg said, “We do not give advertisers access to your personal information. We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.” A 2019 post by Sheryl Sandberg told users, “We don’t sell people’s data and we don’t share personal information with advertisers without permission.” Under Instruction 13, the size of each statement’s anticipated audience, not its wording, set how many violations it carried. By ppc.land’s tally, jurors found all six data-control statements deceptive, adding 10,459,944 violations; all ten statements about auditing apps after Cambridge Analytica were found deceptive too, for 18,146,592 violations, or 41.3% of the full count.
What’s Left for Marketers, Not Lawyers
“We disagree with the verdict and will continue to defend ourselves against efforts to distort our record,” Meta spokesperson Alex Burgos said, adding that “Meta’s platforms are forums for free expression.” The verdict sets no penalty. A hearing is set for Oct. 1, per the AP’s report via the Texarkana Gazette, and Torrez expects a ruling within weeks. The state also wants an injunction, and any penalty collected would go to a New Mexico education fund. It’s New Mexico’s third result against Meta this year, after a $375 million March penalty and a $567 million August abatement order, separate from Meta’s up-to-$18 billion multistate child-safety settlement that released Cambridge Analytica liability for the states that signed it. Villanova law professor Peter Ormerod told the AP: “It’s unlikely that this is going to be the case that effectively penalizes the company in a meaningful way.”
None of this turns on a privacy statute. The UPA is a general consumer-protection law, the kind of tool regulators also reach for against platforms, as in the FTC’s suit over Amazon’s hidden ad surcharges. For anyone who writes public data-handling claims, Instruction 13 is the part to read: under it, exposure grew with a statement’s anticipated audience, and the state didn’t have to show anyone was misled. Promises that a company never sells data, or that users control it, sit in that category, and they have to stay true as the product changes, the way Meta’s controls were set to change when Meta said it would retire its off-site activity setting as Pixel data moved into feed personalization.
