A judge unloaded on a company run by one of President Donald Trump's most powerful tech allies for years of deliberate deception.
New Mexico state court Judge Francis Mathew ordered Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Platforms to pay a $25 billion civil penalty for misleading the public about Facebook's privacy practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Bloomberg Law reported Wednesday. The sum ranks among the largest ever handed down by an American court.
The judgment follows a Santa Fe jury's finding last month that Meta violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. Jurors concluded that the company and its leaders repeatedly misled the public about how Facebook protected user data and policed hate speech.
Mathew pointed to "the clearly intentional and systemic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements" in justifying the award, adding that the company's misconduct "goes to the heart of Facebook's core business practices."
He went further elsewhere in the ruling, according to reporting by Courthouse News.
"Facebook's misrepresentations about users' control of their data were not isolated incidents, but rather a systemic pattern of deception at the core of Facebook's business model," Mathew wrote.
The state law allows up to $5,000 per violation. Mathew found the maximum was warranted, which would have pushed the total past $219 billion, but he trimmed it to $25 billion, below the $35 billion to $40 billion the state sought, according to Bloomberg Law. The penalty carries 15 percent annual interest until Meta pays in full.
The total outstrips the $14.8 billion in general-fund revenue New Mexico expects to collect in fiscal 2028.
The case stems from the scandal in which political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of Facebook users to target voters on Trump's behalf ahead of the 2016 election. Zuckerberg has since moved closer to Trump. He joined other tech executives at the White House for a meeting on artificial intelligence last month.
Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said in a statement that "we are confident we will prevail on appeal."