SANTA FE — A New Mexico judge on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion for deceiving Facebook users about their privacy, the largest penalty ever imposed on the company, in a case rooted in the Cambridge Analytica data scandal of 2018.

The award is five times the $5 billion fine the Federal Trade Commission imposed on Facebook in 2019, and it lands as Meta faces a string of state lawsuits over its platforms. Meta said it would appeal.

State District Court Judge Francis Mathew set the figure in a filing weeks after a jury in Santa Fe found in September that the company had violated New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act more than 43 million times. Each violation carries a civil penalty of up to $5,000, and the judge was left to decide the final sum.

Mathew wrote that the jury's findings justified the maximum penalty per violation, pointing to "the involvement of senior Facebook leadership" and what he called the "clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook's repeated misstatements." At that rate the award came to $219.5 billion before it was reduced to $25 billion, CNBC reported, citing the filing.

Interest will accrue at 15% a year until the penalty is paid, the judge ordered.

In his decision, Mathew described a "coherent strategy designed to mislead the public," CNN reported. "Facebook promised users that they (the users) controlled their data. This was false," he wrote, according to the Associated Press.

He also found that Facebook had not carried out the thorough review it promised after the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Pressure from executives to hold down costs, a lack of enforcement resources and weak investigative methods were among the factors that left the internal inquiry "willfully ineffective," the filing said, according to CNBC.

New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez welcomed the order. "For too long, powerful technology companies have operated as though their size and influence put them beyond the reach of the law," he said in a statement. "This judgement should be a signal, an unambiguous message, to Silicon Valley," he said, according to the AP.

Under the state constitution, money from consumer protection penalties goes to education. Torrez said the sum could pay for school construction for a century, though he acknowledged it will be tied up while Meta appeals.

Meta rejected the ruling. "This ruling, and the Attorney General's approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico," Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney said. "At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal."

During the penalty phase, the state had asked for $35 billion to $40 billion, arguing that only a sum large enough to move Meta's share price would change its conduct, the AP reported. Meta argued for no more than $3.4 billion and said a much larger award would violate due process. Its lawyer, Matt Nicholson, said a $40 billion penalty would be "shocking to the conscience."

The company also argued that the state had not proved its privacy statements were misleading and that the way the state counted violations was unprecedented. Jurors assessed 34 separate statements about privacy and content moderation but rejected claims that Meta had lied about removing harmful material, including COVID-19 misinformation, according to the AP.

The case dates to 2018, when Facebook disclosed that data from as many as 87 million users had been improperly obtained by Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm that used it to build voter profiles. A personality quiz app harvested the information, and the firm's clients included Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Then-Attorney General Hector Balderas sued in 2021, and Torrez took the case to trial.

Meta settled a class action over the same scandal for $725 million in 2022. In August it reached a settlement with a coalition of states, valued by CNN at $18 billion, over claims that its platforms harmed young people, which also released it from those states' Cambridge Analytica claims. New Mexico was not a party, which let its case go ahead.

The penalty is the second large loss for Meta in New Mexico this year. In a separate case brought by Torrez, a jury in March ordered the company to pay $375 million over harm to children, and a judge later ordered a further $567 million into an abatement fund. Meta has said it will appeal that ruling too.

The order arrived on the day Meta reported third-quarter results. Revenue rose 26% from a year earlier to more than $64 billion, but operating income of nearly $13 billion fell short of Wall Street expectations, which the company attributed to a charge for the August settlement, CNN reported. Meta shares rose more than 3% in after-hours trading.

Chief Financial Officer Susan Li told analysts the company was monitoring "active legal and regulatory matters that could significantly impact our business and financial results," including further youth-related trials scheduled for later this year and next.

New Mexico is also seeking a court injunction to stop Meta from repeating the practices at issue, while interest on the $25 billion keeps building through the appeal.