Judge rips Trump ally’s ‘clearly intentional’ deception with historic penalty: report

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,...