Mark Zuckerberg told lawyers for New Mexico that he had not seen the list of more than 799,000 US individuals, entities, groups and pages that Meta's CrossCheck system routed to extra review before enforcement as of August 29, 2025, a figure that stood at 13,500 in November 2020. The admission comes from a 1 hour 37 minute video deposition that the New Mexico Department of Justice played for the court in Santa Fe on September 10, 2026, two days after the state's Facebook trial opened, and posted to YouTube on September 11, 2026.

In Short

Before the trial that ended with a $25 billion penalty against Meta, New Mexico showed the court a long recorded interview in which its lawyer questioned Mark Zuckerberg under oath. Most of the questions were about promises Facebook made that everyone follows the same rules, and about a list of hundreds of thousands of accounts whose posts got an extra check before anything was taken down. Zuckerberg said the rules were the same for everyone, said he did not know many of the details, and could not say whether Meta followed its own advisers' suggestions to fix the system.

The recording and what it covers

The video, titled "Mark Zuckerberg Video Deposition - New Mexico vs. Facebook Trial - 9/10/2026," was published on September 11, 2026 on the YouTube channel of New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Its description reads: "On Sept. 8, 2026, New Mexico's case against Facebook began. On Sept. 10, this video deposition of Mark Zuckerberg was played for the Court." It runs 1:37:50. A timestamp burned into the first frames of the recording reads July 14, 2026, which suggests the deposition was taped about two months before trial, though the description gives no recording date. The channel had 787 subscribers and the video had drawn 978 comments when the page was captured.

The state's lawyer is not named in the recording. The questioning covers four subjects in roughly this order: Zuckerberg's control of Meta, the company's public promises of equal enforcement, the politician whitelist and CrossCheck programs, and Facebook's privacy statements from 2010. The deposition ends mid-sentence as the time allowed runs out: "Okay. Council, I think you're out of."

A note on the quotations. They are taken from YouTube's automatically generated English transcript of the video, reproduced as they appear. The machine transcript renders several names phonetically, which PPC Land has corrected in its own text but not inside quotation marks: "Cheryl Sanberg" for Sheryl Sandberg, "Elliot Shre" and "Mr. Shreg" for Elliot Schrage, "Andrew Noise" for what appears to be Andrew Noyes, "chakraarti" for Samidh Chakrabarti, "Senator Marky" for Senator Ed Markey, "Sarah Win Williams" for Sarah Wynn-Williams, and "Council" for counsel. The video has no chapter markers.

PPC Land has covered the case at each stage. A Santa Fe jury found 43,899,720 violations of the Unfair Practices Act on September 25, 2026, and Judge Francis J. Mathew set the civil penalty at $25 billion on October 21. The written judgment, which adds 15% annual interest, devotes its longest passage to CrossCheck. The deposition shows how the state built that part of the case in front of Zuckerberg himself.

Control of the company

The questioning opened with three questions on whether the law applies equally regardless of wealth, intelligence and corporate size. Zuckerberg agreed with each: "I think that's right. The law should apply equally to everyone."

The lawyer then put to him that Meta had "announced a goal of continuing to grow and to try to increase its value by 500 times that to 9 trillion uh in the next five years by 2031." Zuckerberg disputed the framing. After the exhibit was shown and the lawyer said she had meant 500%, he described the figure as an executive pay milestone rather than a company target: "We have an incentive program for executives where they earn certain amounts of um compensation at different milestones. One of those milestones, I think, is roughly corresponding to what you're saying, but there are others as well. This wasn't a program that you know we announced as the goal of the company." Six times a $1.5 trillion valuation is $9 trillion, a 500% increase, so the corrected figure is internally consistent; "500 times" was not.

On governance, he drew a distinction between share ownership and voting power. "I don't have the majority of the stock in Facebook. Yeah, I have a a an amount of the stock that gives me a majority of the vote." Asked whether that meant he could not be removed, he said: "The board can fire me," and added that "if I wanted to after being fired, I could in theory elect a different board because I'm the controlling shareholder of the company. But that doesn't mean that they can't fire me or that that wouldn't be a very complicated and messy proceeding." The lawyer read back testimony he gave in a California case on February 18, 2026, in which he said, referring to a Joe Rogan interview, that "if the board wanted to fire me as the as the person who has the majority of the votes in the company, I could elect a new board and reinstate myself." His response: "Yeah. And that's also what I just said."

The point of the sequence became clear later. Asked whether he could stop things inside the company he did not approve of, Zuckerberg answered: "If I was aware of them." That qualifier recurred for the rest of the deposition.

The equal enforcement promises

New Mexico's case included three statements promising even-handed enforcement of Facebook's rules. The jury found all three willfully deceptive, accounting for 4,159,944 violations, as PPC Land reported in its reading of the verdict form. The deposition walked Zuckerberg through each source.

The first was his October 28, 2020 testimony to the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, after the lawyer first gave the date as November 28 and Zuckerberg corrected it from the exhibit. The lawyer read his answer to Senator Markey: "Senator, yes, incitement of violence is against our policy and there are no exceptions to that, including for politicians." Zuckerberg accepted the text but objected to a paraphrase: "I'm not sure I would say there are not exceptions. I'd probably say there are no exceptions."

The second and third were his own Facebook posts from June 2020. From a June 26, 2020 post: "even if a politician or government official says it, if we determine that content may lead to violence or deprive people of their right to vote, we will take that content down. Similarly, there are no exceptions for politicians in any of the policies I'm announcing here today." From another post, exhibit 202: "There is no exception to this policy for politicians or newsworthiness." Zuckerberg confirmed both readings, the first with: "It sounds like it."

Then came the July 17, 2018 Newsroom post, which Zuckerberg described as "sort of like our corporate blog." Under the heading cross check, it read: "we remove content from Facebook no matter who posts it when it violates our standards. There are no special protections for any group whether on the right or the left." The same post defined the system: "Cross check the system described in dispatches simply means that some content from certain pages or profiles is given a second layer of review to make sure we've applied our policies correctly." Asked whether that was Facebook's stated policy on that date, Zuckerberg said: "I I think that that's a fair interpretation."

The politician whitelist

The lawyer moved to a separate list. Asked whether Facebook created "a white list, which shielded politicians from being fact checked," Zuckerberg said he was "not familiar with what you're referring to as a white list." He described instead a policy direction given to fact-checkers: "we were trying to focus on like bad and harmful hoaxes not parsing you know words and political speech." Pressed on whether that meant politicians were not fact-checked, he said: "we explicitly told them that the point of the facteing program wasn't to primarily focus on like parsing the words of politicians, but to stop broad misinformation from spreading on the platform."

Meta's own sworn interrogatory answers, admitted as plaintiff's trial exhibit 598, put numbers on it. According to the answers as read in the deposition, "as of November 3rd 2020 Facebook maintained a politician white list that contained over 4,300 individuals and entities located in the United States." By August 29, 2025, according to the same document, the list "contained over 5,500 individuals and entities located in the United States." The lists themselves were exhibits 206 and 205.

Zuckerberg did not dispute the figures. "I don't deny it, but I also am saying that I don't think I've seen this before. So, I also can't confirm it." On whether similar lists existed for politicians outside the US, he said: "I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer that question." Asked whether people on the list were treated differently from ordinary users, he answered: "No, I don't think that's true."

The whitelist questions concern a program that no longer operates in its 2020 form. Meta ended its US third-party fact-checking program on April 7, 2025, replacing it with Community Notes, after Zuckerberg said in a January 2025 interview that he worried about the company "becoming this sort of decider of truth". The deposition did not ask why a politician whitelist was still being maintained in August 2025, four months after the fact-checking program it was built for had ended in the US, and Zuckerberg did not address it.

CrossCheck: 13,500 to 799,000

CrossCheck, written XCheck in many internal Meta documents, was the core of the state's equal-treatment case. Zuckerberg's description of its purpose stayed constant throughout: "it was focused on sensitive accounts where we were worried about making mistakes on on review." He said it "also included people like human rights activists and journalists and people who might have enemies who were trying to flag their content or get it taken down." And he rejected the idea that it created two sets of rules: "the rules and policies are exactly the same for the people on the cross checklist as they are for people who aren't."

The size of the program came from Meta's interrogatory answers. As of November 3, 2020, the cross-check list "contained 13,500 individuals, entities, groups, and pages located in the United States." By August 29, 2025, Zuckerberg read aloud from page 15 of the answers, "Facebook maintained a cross checklist that contained over 799,000 individuals, entities, groups, and pages located in the United States comprising individuals entities, groups, and pages that received additional level of review after content is identified." By PPC Land's calculation, that is roughly 59 times the 2020 figure. The lawyer said the 2025 list, trial exhibit 207, ran to almost 5,000 pages at about 164 names per page.

Zuckerberg accepted the number. "I assume that this was reviewed very carefully and very accurately." But he said he had not seen the list: "I haven't seen the document before, so I can read it if you want, but I think that would take probably more time than we have today." His defence was proportional: "we have more than three billion people on our platforms. So while um you can say that you know some number of thousands or tens of thousands of of people is a large number and absolute it's a relatively extremely small percent of the overall community."

Who was on it

The lawyer asked about categories: business partners, celebrities, podcasters and influencers. Zuckerberg said he could not name business partners on the list and answered "I think so" on podcasters and influencers. Asked about specific names, including Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Infowars and the Oath Keepers, he said he did not know. At one point, looking at the exhibit, he asked: "what is this? Did you print the same thing over and over again just to make it look like this is more pages?" The lawyer answered: "No, sir. I don't think so."

On Breitbart, he said: "I don't know that for a fact, but as a prominent outlet, it seems like they might be."

The Joe Rogan email

The most specific evidence concerned Joe Rogan. Zuckerberg first said he did not remember Rogan asking to be added to any program, though "I do think we've taken down and made content mistakes on his content." The lawyer then showed trial exhibit 261, an email from Zuckerberg. In it, according to the lawyer's reading, Zuckerberg wrote that Rogan "messaged me that posts on the Joe Rogan Experience Companion IG page keep getting flagged," and asked: "if we have a list of accounts that we double re double review before taking action on them, can we put Joe's pages on that list to make sure we're reducing false positives on his accounts as much as possible?"

On September 22, 2023, a Meta employee replied, in the lawyer's reading: "We are glad to report that Joe's relationship manager has shared the full list of accounts managed by Joe's team and the relevant X check tags have been added to those accounts, ensuring a second review prior to enforcement." Zuckerberg said: "I think you're summarizing this correctly." He added one caveat, that he was not sure Rogan ran the companion page himself: "I think that that may be someone else that he's he's raising this on on behalf of."

Asked whether he agreed with former civic integrity head Samidh Chakrabarti's deposition testimony that there was "a friend of friends of Mark and a friends of Cheryl um group of people" added to the list at management's request, Zuckerberg said: "off the top of my head, I don't recall anything like that."

Time to enforcement

The state's argument was that extra review meant violating content stayed up. Zuckerberg conceded the mechanism: the program "required review of the content by at a more senior level in order to make sure that we were making the right content decisions, which meant it didn't get taken down right away." He resisted the implication that this was unusual, noting that "there's a lot of content that gets flagged by an AI program for a person to look at."

His central counter-argument was about virality. He said that "we also as I think an operational matter are more attentive to things that are going viral and getting a lot of distribution than things that are not seen by many people." He said he did not recognise "fire brigaded," which the lawyer described as three levels of review before removal: "I don't think I've heard that term until just now when you're saying this."

The Breitbart example tested the virality argument. According to plaintiff's exhibit 258, a July 2020 Breitbart live video containing COVID-19 misinformation was flagged by an automated system, held for further review under XCheck and escalated before enforcement. By the time review was complete, the lawyer said, the broadcast had 40 million views. Zuckerberg read the metric more narrowly: "It is saying here that it had that it VPV I think means it showed up in feed. That doesn't necessarily mean that those people watched the the whole broadcast." He then added: "at least 40 million people would have scrolled by it in the feed."

The Oversight Board report he had not read

The final CrossCheck section concerned the Oversight Board's policy advisory opinion on the program, plaintiff's exhibit 210, a 57-page report from 2022. The lawyer said Meta had asked the board to review CrossCheck after a 2021 Wall Street Journal series criticised it. Zuckerberg said he did not remember the request, and later that "I was not even aware that we asked them for an advisory opinion."

Asked whether, as chief executive, he had reviewed the report, he said: "I assume the company had it. I don't believe that I reviewed this." He then read the executive summary during the deposition and confirmed the lawyer's reading of its central finding, that the program "appears more directly structured to satisfy business concerns." "I mean, I think you're accurately reading what is in this report," he said. The lawyer also read: "by providing extra protection to certain users selected largely according to business interests, cross check allows content which would otherwise be removed quickly to remain up for a longer period of time."

On delay, the report stated: "Meta told the board that on average it can take more than five days to reach a decision on content from users on cross checklist." Zuckerberg said he had "no reason to okay think that anything that our team told them would be inaccurate," but questioned how the average was distributed: "I would assume that the average of five days probably skews heavily towards content that is not going um not getting a lot of views." Asked whether he knew that, he said: "I don't. Except that's how most of our programs work."

The court's written judgment uses a longer figure. According to finding 48 of the October 21 judgment, Facebook told its Oversight Board that the average time to a final decision for US accounts under CrossCheck review was "approximately twelve days." The deposition figure of more than five days refers to users on the cross-check list generally, as the report was read; the judgment figure is limited to US accounts. The two numbers come from different passages and are not necessarily in conflict, but the judgment's is the one the court adopted.

The lawyer then asked about four recommendations: removing business considerations from the review process (recommendation 2), using teams "independent from political or economic influence including from Meta's public policy teams" to evaluate entities for list inclusion (recommendation 8), publicly marking accounts that receive special treatment (recommendation 12), and not operating the programs at a backlog. On each, Zuckerberg's answer was a version of "I'm not sure." Asked whether Meta had marked accounts as receiving extra review, he said: "I don't believe so." On publication of the lists: "I'm not aware of of having published them, but I don't know either way." On a current backlog: "I don't know."

He also set out his view of what such recommendations are for: "I don't know if the point of this exercise is to implement every single recommendation that is made as much as to look at them in in whole and try to improve our system overall."

Advertising and targeting

The final third of the deposition went back to Facebook's early years and its advertising model. Zuckerberg agreed to the growth figures put to him: 1 million users by December 2004, 100 million by August 2008 and about 400 million by 2010. He said 2009 "was around when we became profitable," and agreed that Meta had "over two $200 billion in revenue and made a profit of over $60 billion last year," replying: "I think that's right."

On targeting, the lawyer used a wedding services example, asking whether an advertiser could reach women aged 18 to 35 who were about to be engaged. Zuckerberg said advertisers could reach "people who were interested in certain things or that matched certain profiles like an age range or were engaged," but that "the only way that we'd know that is if the person had said, 'I'm engaged.'" He defended ad personalization in general terms: "showing people both ads and content that are relevant to their interests is um generally going to be more useful for everyone."

Asked whether the system could find people who said in private posts that they were depressed, for a depression drug advertiser, he said: "I'm not sure." He drew a line between profile data and inference: "there's a very big difference between people putting specific information on their profile ... versus having the system try to infer different things from posts which we've tried to get more sophisticated on over time."

The sharpest exchange concerned beauty advertising. Asked whether a beauty brand could target young women right after they deleted a selfie, Zuckerberg said: "I don't believe we ever offered that as a as an option for targeting." Told that former Facebook policy executive Sarah Wynn-Williams had described it as something offered to advertisers, he said: "I've certainly never heard about anything like that." Wynn-Williams' allegation that Facebook tracked when girls aged 13 to 17 deleted selfies and served beauty ads appears in the federal lawsuit she filed against Meta in June 2026, where it remains an allegation.

On scale and advertisers, he argued that reach matters less than relevance: "if you're a you know a local bakery it probably doesn't matter how many people are using Facebook in other countries. It just matters is this an effective platform for helping me find people who might be interested in my baked goods in my community."

Developer access

On the developer platform, Zuckerberg rejected the premise that Facebook gave app developers "unrestricted access to both user data and to their friends data" between 2010 and 2014: "I think that's not correct at all." He said user permission was the key step: "it is not the case that a developer can just show up and start asking a lot of information about people who have not given permission to to to use it." Questions about friends' data, which made up the largest category of violations in the verdict, were not pursued further in the recording.

"Never" becomes "we do not"

The last documentary sequence concerned Facebook's response to a 2010 Wall Street Journal report, which the lawyer described as showing Facebook "had been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find customer names and other personal details despite promises that they don't share information without consent." The lawyer dated the article to March 2010. PPC Land's verdict coverage dated the oldest statement on trial, a Washington Post op-ed by Zuckerberg, to May 24, 2010.

According to emails shown as plaintiff's exhibit 016, the op-ed was first drafted by a policy communications manager for publication under Sheryl Sandberg's name. Zuckerberg wrote, in his own paraphrase during the deposition, that "this is about our product and it's adapted from a blog post that I wrote. So I thought it should come from me."

His draft listed five core principles. Elliot Schrage, then head of global communications, replied with comments. According to the lawyer's reading, Schrage wrote: "I need to think more about whether we frame our privacy announcements around these core principles. I think we may face some challenges." Under the principle that users control how their information is shared, he wrote: "we share aggregated information about you with advertisers and you cannot prevent it." Under "we never share your personal information with people or services you don't want," he wrote: "We just had a problem highlighted by the Wall Street Journal that contradicts this," and "We share publicly available information to anyone who pings the API." Under "we never give advertisers access to your personal information," the same objection about the Journal report appeared.

Zuckerberg confirmed the readings and described the exchange as normal: "these are very nuanced points where I think it's a good debate to have internally about how to articulate this in a way that communicates the basic beliefs that we have um while also allowing for the nuances of of how some of this works."

The published op-ed, exhibit 7, changed "we never" to "we do not" in those two principles, according to the lawyer. Asked whether there was any difference, Zuckerberg said: "I think saying that you will never do something is different from saying you do not do something." Asked to explain the edit, he said: "maybe never had some implication of kind of on an ongoing basis whereas we're here we're just saying what we do and do not do now. But I I don't know. That's kind of speculating."

The deposition closed with questions on Zuckerberg's own privacy, including tape over a webcam ("I seem to remember at some point doing something like that, but I think this was a very long time ago and I think it was in the context of work, not personal") and the purchase of surrounding properties, which he said was for "privacy and security and space." The last exchanges concerned the phrase "move fast and break things," which he described as "one of the slogans, but we had multiple of them."

Why this matters for advertisers

For marketers, the deposition is less about the $25 billion figure than about how Meta's enforcement worked for the accounts with the largest audiences. CrossCheck was described by Meta as a mistake-prevention system. The Oversight Board report, as read to Zuckerberg, said its selection was "largely according to business interests," and Meta's own interrogatory answers show it covering more than 799,000 US entries in 2025. Advertisers buying placements next to content from high-profile pages, influencers and publishers are buying next to the accounts most likely to sit on that list.

That bears directly on brand safety. If content from listed accounts stays up during a second review that, according to the court's findings, averaged about twelve days for US accounts, the period in which a violating post can accrue impressions next to ads is longer for those accounts than for ordinary users. Zuckerberg's response was that viral content is prioritised. He also said he had no direct knowledge that this was the case for CrossCheck.

The deposition also shows how the statutory damages model in this case turned public statements into liability. Three of the 26 statements the jury found unlawful were the equal-enforcement promises read to Zuckerberg on September 10. A Newsroom post, a Facebook post by the chief executive and Senate testimony were each counted against the number of New Mexico users. As PPC Land noted when the judgment was filed, the court listed earnings calls, Newsroom posts and interviews as channels through which the unlawful statements reached users.

Meta has said it does not sell user data and that New Mexico did not prove any consumer was misled. The judgment is expected to be appealed, and injunctive relief, which could address how CrossCheck operates in the state, remains reserved for further briefing. Meta has since booked a reserve for the penalty in its third-quarter filing.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Meta Platforms, questioned by a lawyer for the State of New Mexico, whose Attorney General Raúl Torrez brought the case. Documents shown involve Sheryl Sandberg, Elliot Schrage, Samidh Chakrabarti, Joe Rogan and Meta's Oversight Board.

What: A 1 hour 37 minute video deposition in which Zuckerberg said CrossCheck applied the same rules to everyone, accepted Meta's sworn figures that the list grew from 13,500 US entries in 2020 to more than 799,000 in 2025, said he had not seen the list or reviewed the Oversight Board's 2022 report on it, and could not say whether Meta adopted the board's recommendations.

When: Played for the court on September 10, 2026, posted to YouTube on September 11, 2026. The recording carries a July 14, 2026 timestamp. The jury verdict followed on September 25 and the $25 billion judgment on October 21, 2026.

Where: The First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms, case D-101-CV-2021-00132. The video is on the New Mexico Attorney General's YouTube channel.

Why: The state used the deposition to tie Zuckerberg's public promises of equal enforcement to a system that, by Meta's own count, gave hundreds of thousands of accounts extra review before enforcement. For advertisers, it shows that enforcement on Meta's highest-profile accounts ran on a separate, slower track, which is relevant to brand safety next to that content.