Santa Fe, New Mexico - Meta has been ordered to pay $25 billion in connection with the years-old Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal, a judge in New Mexico announced on Wednesday. 

A jury had previously found that Facebook misled users over privacy and free speech on the platform. The judge calculated the penalty at almost $219.5 billion, before reducing it to $25 billion in the same sentence.

In an initial response, Meta expressed confidence that it would win on appeal. After the jury's verdict a few weeks ago, the company said it disagreed with the decision and would continue to defend itself against the allegations.

Penalties of up to $5,000 had been set for each violation, and the jury found millions of violations, which added up to billions of dollars according to the judge's calculations.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal badly damaged public trust in Facebook in 2018. Information collected through what appeared to be an innocuous survey conducted by a data researcher was used to build user profiles and shared with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

The team of Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, also used the data before the 2016 presidential election. In total, around 87 million user accounts were affected.

Meta subsequently paid about $6 billion to the US government, among other measures, to settle investigations related to the case.

In the aftermath of the scandal, New Mexico took the company to court in 2021 with allegations concerning freedom of expression on the platform, prompted by revelations that emerged during the broader investigation into Facebook's practices.

Among other claims, a whistleblower report said that some prominent accounts had been secretly exempted from rules on content allowed on the platform.