Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer from 2008 to 2022, told lawyers for the State of New Mexico that she did not know whether Facebook verified app developers' identities, checked who owned their apps or required them to say how user data would be used between 2012 and 2018, according to a video deposition played to the jury in the state's Facebook privacy trial on September 14, 2026. The New Mexico Department of Justice published the 1 hour, 28 minute recording on YouTube on September 28, 2026, three days after jurors found 26 of 29 Facebook statements misleading.

In Short

A video shows Sheryl Sandberg, who ran Facebook's business for 14 years, answering a state lawyer's questions about privacy promises, app developers and false content, and it was played to the jury that later found Facebook misled people. She defended the company's line that it does not sell people's data, said she was not the right person to explain how Facebook shared data with apps, and could not say whether basic checks on app makers existed. The testimony matters because her own public statements were among those the jury counted, and a judge has since turned those findings into a $25 billion penalty that Meta plans to appeal.

The video and what it is

The recording runs 1:28:05 and is titled "Sheryl Sandberg Video Deposition - New Mexico vs. Facebook Trial - 9/14/2026." It sits on the YouTube channel of the New Mexico Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, which also carries a separate video of Mark Zuckerberg's deposition dated September 10, 2026. The description is two sentences long: "On Sept. 8, 2026, New Mexico's case against Facebook began. On Sept. 14, this video deposition of Sheryl Sandberg was played for the Court." By late October the upload had drawn 75,362 views and 261 comments.

The description does not give a recording date, and the video has no chapters. A timestamp burned into the footage does: it reads August 15, 2025, more than a year before the jury saw it. That fits one of the questions. The state's lawyer asked whether Sandberg was aware "that after Donald Trump assumed the presidency this year that Facebook fired all of its third party facte" checkers - a reference to the end of Meta's US fact-checking programme, which PPC Land reported was announced on January 7, 2025 and ended on April 7, 2025. Zuckerberg's deposition in the same case carries a timestamp of July 14, 2026, so Sandberg was questioned about 11 months before him.

The video is an edited presentation rather than a continuous record. Questions refer to exhibits and statements that never appear on screen, and the recording closes mid-answer, with Sandberg's words "I don't" cut off at 1:28:02. Exhibits are identified by number, from 394 to 402. The questioner is not named on screen. In the final minutes a second lawyer, who appears to represent Sandberg or the company, refers back to the earlier examiner as "Miss McGin" and "Miss McInn." Randi McGinn was the lawyer who asked the court for $35 billion to $40 billion on New Mexico's behalf, according to PPC Land's coverage. The quotations below follow the video's automatically generated captions, which render several names inconsistently - Elliot Schrage, for instance, appears as "Elliot Sprag," "Elliot Shre," "Elliot Trey" and "Mr. Shreg."

Sandberg is not a defendant. Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook, was sued in 2021 under New Mexico's Unfair Practices Act, and the jury that watched this video found 43,899,720 violations on September 25, 2026. Six of the 29 statements on the verdict form were hers, and PPC Land's reading of the verdict was that all three statements the jury rejected came from other Facebook staff.

Hired for advertising

The questioning opened with Sandberg's role. She agreed that she reported directly to Zuckerberg, who was 23 when she joined in 2008, and that he could overrule anyone. "It's not possible for one person to make all decisions, but if he wanted to have the final say on something, he could," she said.

Asked whether she was hired for her skill in public relations, she pointed elsewhere. "I mean, you'd have to ask Mark, but I think more my experience with the advertising business at Google," Sandberg said. Her title there, she clarified, was in "global online sales and operations." Advertising was already Facebook's main revenue source when she arrived. "There were ads. I think those ads needed to be improved to create a more robust business to support the company," she said.

She declined to put figures on the growth. Asked how much ad revenue rose between 2008 and 2022, she answered "I mean a lot," then "Many many many times. And again this is all a matter of public record." Pressed for the start and end points, she said "I don't remember the specific numbers and I like to be precise and again it's very easy to look these numbers up." On user numbers she was more specific. When the lawyer put Facebook's 2008 audience at about 100 million users, Sandberg said "I thought there were about 70 million, but that sounds roughly right."

Her personal wealth, she agreed, came mostly from "stock appreciation" rather than salary or bonuses. Her holding at departure was "A small percentage. It was worth a lot, but it was a very small percentage." She said she had no disagreements with Zuckerberg about the company's direction, beyond a lack of personal enthusiasm for virtual and augmented reality. "I think I wasn't as interested in the metaverse as I was in the core Facebook product," she said, adding that she gets "very motion sick."

Asked about non-disparagement clauses, she said she did not remember signing anything when she left. "The only thing I have to do today or anytime I'm in a situation like this is tell the whole truth. And that's what I'm doing."

How targeting worked, in Sandberg's words

The most detailed exchanges for the advertising industry concerned what advertisers receive. Asked whether data about Facebook's users has value to advertisers, Sandberg answered "not directly because they're not given access to that data," and added: "They're not given access to the user's name or data. Advertisers are able to reach a broad audience or a narrow audience on Facebook."

She described the value of data as a matter of delivery. "Data is useful to help make sure you reach the right audience so you're spending your money effectively and efficiently and so users see advertisements they want to see that are more relevant to them and a better user experience," she said.

When the lawyer offered an example - an advertiser asking to reach only women - Sandberg corrected the wording mid-answer. "Facebook would show your ad just to women that is different than giving you access to women or the data. We did not provide direct access," she said. The lawyer then summarised the process: an advertiser asks to reach women, Facebook quotes a price, and Facebook runs the ad to that audience. Sandberg agreed.

A later hypothetical, men aged 20 to 45, produced a caveat about data quality. "I don't think our data was always correct, but but to the extent that people were entering accurate data, we could do that," she said.

She also resisted the word "collects." Facebook, she said, is "given data actively by users," which she called "a little bit different I think than collecting." On profiles, she said "Users create their own profiles." She agreed that activity such as likes was saved, explaining that "if you liked something, it would save that information so that you would see more things from things you liked," and that Facebook itself held that information.

"Over and over again"

Two short answers went to the heart of the state's case. The lawyer asked whether Facebook "publicly promised over and over again" that users could control who could see their information. Sandberg said "Yes." Asked whether it "also promised over and over again that their personal information was not being sold," she said "Yes" again.

She also agreed that trust mattered to growth. "I think trust if your question is is trust important in the service? Yes. The answer to that is yes."

A tested message

The state's lawyer spent several minutes on how Facebook built public statements. Sandberg described four groups - policy, communications, legal and product - that reviewed messages, usually coordinated in her case by "my chief of staff, which we called business lead." On focus groups, she said "There was one period of time where we did um some dial testing looking at how small audiences were reacting to specific words and how we explained things to make sure they were clear and understood. But for the most part, we were not a particularly heavy user of focus groups that I'm aware of."

She described earnings calls in detail. Zuckerberg gave the product or vision overview, Sandberg covered advertising and revenue, and the chief financial officer handled the numbers. "We had written scripts that were written out in advance that we would write or someone else would write for us and we would edit and people would look at particularly legal to make sure everything was valid and true and accurate," she said. Practice sessions were attended by the same groups, "and people would jump in and say here's a better answer to that or here's a more complete answer to that." She said she practised herself, despite years of interviews: "I think that's a good thing."

The lawyer then turned to the phrase from Zuckerberg's 2010 Washington Post piece, "we don't sell any of your information to anyone and we never will." Sandberg rejected the idea that it was repeated in that form. "Uh, we said we don't sell your information to advertisers," she said.

Exhibit 394, a communications document, showed the line among messages tested with audiences. According to the lawyer, the phrase "tested at 42%" above other options in a measure labelled "statement greatly reduces my concerns," while a message stating "we only share aggregated information or anonymized data with advertisers" tested lowest of 10. Sandberg did not accept the framing. "I see this document, but I don't have any independent knowledge about what it is or how it was done," she said, and noted that the page did not say what concerns were being reduced. On the ranking: "Of the 10 statements they show. They might have tested many more statements to get to these 10. I don't know."

The January 24, 2019 post

Exhibit 395 was Sandberg's own post of January 24, 2019, one of her six statements on the verdict form: "We don't sell people's data and we don't share personal information with advertisers without permission." The lawyer pointed out that it did not tell users they could not control how certain publicly available information was shared, or that Facebook shared public information with "anyone who pings the API." Both phrases, and the earlier "we share aggregated information about you with advertisers and you cannot prevent it," echo comments Elliot Schrage made on a 2010 draft of Zuckerberg's privacy op-ed, which were shown during Zuckerberg's deposition on September 10.

Sandberg rejected the premise that omissions made the statement inaccurate. "We also don't say you know cats don't fall from the sky," she said. "The question feels to me like it has a tone or implication that it should have been included and what I'm saying is we did not include it so you are correct but we also shouldn't have or didn't need to because it's not necessary." On the API point: "Same answer. It does not say that. Nor do I believe that was necessary for this to be accurate and complete."

The jury took a different view. All six of Sandberg's statements on the form were among the 26 it found misleading, according to PPC Land's reading of the verdict, and the written judgment of October 21 names Sandberg personally in its findings on how the representations reached the public.

Six answers on app developers

The longest stretch concerned third-party apps. Sandberg cited FarmVille as an example of a partnership, in which "users could share their data, users could use their service on our platform." She declined to describe how the application programming interface gave developers access to user data. "I don't think I know how APIs actually work because I've never written code. I'm not an engineer," she said. When the lawyer pressed her as former COO, she answered: "I have the same job and the same answer. I'm still not an engineer and I'm not the right person to explain technically how an API works."

The lawyer then put a series of propositions about the period from 2012 to 2018. Sandberg objected to the first compound question - "I disagree with so many different parts of that sentence" - and the lawyer broke it into parts. Her answers:

  • No identity verification process for app developers: "I don't know that to be true."
  • Inaccurate developer country data, with the example of a developer in Moscow and a business entity in the US: "I don't know."
  • No process to check whether a developer owned the app: "I don't know."
  • No process to check whether a developer built the app for itself or for others: "I I don't know."
  • Developers self-identifying their app as political, surveillance or academic, without investigation: "I don't know."
  • No requirement for developers to say how user data would be used: "I don't know."
  • Enforcement teams spread too thin to be effective: "No, I don't believe that's right."
  • No safeguards against banned users returning as developers: "I don't believe that's right."

The lawyer then produced Exhibit 396, described as a summary by the law firm Gibson Dunn of the investigation into app developers after Cambridge Analytica. Sandberg said "I don't remember this document," and that the legal and platform teams, not she, dealt with the firm. She agreed the document recorded findings matching the first six propositions, along with "too little information required of developers" and "limited enforcement resources" that were "stretched too thin to be effective." Each time, her answer took the same form: "It says that here." She disputed the characterisation that followed: "I'm not sure it says anywhere here that Facebook had done wrong."

Her own memory of the investigation centred on contact details. "In fact, many apps were shut down after this investigation primarily because we didn't have up-to-date contact information," she said, describing registered contacts who had moved jobs and requests that went unanswered.

In the closing minutes, the second lawyer asked whether she knew if anything in Exhibit 396 was "technically or factually accurate." She answered "I do not," and said the document did not look like a final version.

"A million developers"

Exhibit 397 was Sandberg's email of March 22, 2018 to Gene Sperling, former director of the National Economic Council, whom she agreed had been an outside consultant "for Facebook and for me." The lawyer dated it five days after the Cambridge Analytica stories of March 17, 2018, and read the line that "there were a million developers with access to the data." Sandberg acknowledged the email but not the figure: "I don't remember the number, but there were definitely a large number." The October 21 judgment quotes the same email with the word in capitals, "there were a MILLION developers with access to the data," according to PPC Land's reading of the findings.

Cambridge Analytica: "I don't know"

The lawyer walked through the facts of the 2018 scandal: Aleksandr Kogan's 2013 access, 270,000 survey takers, data on 87 million users, and a sale to Cambridge Analytica. Sandberg did not confirm any of the numbers. "I don't know if that was ever verified," she said of the survey figure. On the 87 million: "I don't remember a specific number." On whether Kogan was a professor: "I don't know."

She said Facebook's ability to investigate was limited. "Facebook was able to investigate only what happened on its own platform, but an actual investigation of Cambridge Analytica and Mr. Kogan was not possible by Facebook because he was in another country," Sandberg said. "We wanted to do an audit but weren't permitted to. They didn't have to comply and we had no legal mechanism to to make that happen." The only real investigation, she said, was the British government's, "and I believe the British government's investigation was mainly focused on Brexit, not the US election."

On whether the data affected the 2016 US election: "I don't believe it was proven that it swung the election, nor do I believe it was of a size where it could have swung a whole election, even if it was true."

On disclosure, her answers were mostly "I don't remember." That applied to whether Facebook told users before March 17, 2018, whether anyone announced the compromise when Kogan's access was revoked in 2017, the lawyer's figure of a drop of 1.9 million to 2.1 million users, and the 10% fall in the share price. When the lawyer later showed her Exhibit 399, a CNBC transcript, Sandberg accepted that it reported shares "down 10%." She objected to the phrase "counter messaging campaign": "I think we tried to put out accurate messages. I don't think we considered them a campaign."

The CNBC interview and the promise to notify

Exhibit 399 was the transcript of Sandberg's CNBC interview with Julia Boorstin on March 22, 2018. In it, as the lawyer read aloud, Sandberg said "this was a huge breach of trust. People come to Facebook every day and they depend upon us to protect their data and I am so sorry that we let so many people down." Sandberg said the reading was accurate, but added: "sometimes these transcripts get edited, so I can't say that's exactly what I said, but it's definitely the transcript they put out." The same interview supplied one of her six statements at trial, "Cambridge Analytica never should have had this data."

Sandberg read aloud her own answer from that interview: "we definitely didn't realize the gravity of this issue sooner and the commitment we made yesterday is to investigate to audit and to make it transparent to to users to tell users if their data if their data was used." Asked whether Facebook told everyone whose data was breached, she said "I I believe we stuck to that commitment."

The lawyer put further figures: that the investigation looked closely at only 700 developers, shut down about 200, reinstated many of those and was closed by 2021. Sandberg said she did not remember the numbers, and "I know it was shut down at some point. I don't remember if it was 2021." She explained the scope: "I think we were unable to investigate all of the app developers because there were too many um and we prioritized the large the largest of them which is what you would do if you have a million developers." The 700 figure sits awkwardly with the record elsewhere. At trial, Meta's lawyer told jurors the investigation involved more than 700 investigators and cost $130 million, and the judgment cites more than 2,000 apps flagged for possible misuse. The judgment also records that the investigation was shut down in March 2021 without public announcement.

Exhibits 400 and 401 were an email from Chris Cox to Zuckerberg, copied to Sandberg about a year after the scandal broke, and an attached notification framework. The lawyer described three steps: check for unintended use, access or exposure of data; check for conditions such as a malicious actor or a risk of imminent harm; then check for mitigating reasons not to notify, such as a notification causing more harm. Sandberg confirmed the description and defended the threshold. "If you were going to notify everyone whose data was accessed by a third party developer, you would be notifying everyone all the time," she said. "It's not data being accessed. It's data being accessed inappropriately or by malicious actors that we were going to notify."

One in three

Exhibit 398 contained a line Sandberg had written in 2018: "today in the US less than one in three Facebook users believe we care about them." She said the document was part of her "HPM" from that year, that it did not refresh her memory of knowing the number at the time, "but I believe that number to be true." She preferred "alleged breach" to "breach."

Holocaust denial and "we took down hate"

The final third of the video turned to content. Exhibit 402 was an email to Sandberg from the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who proposed that Holocaust denial be treated as fake news under any fact-checking system and suggested an independent organisation such as Encyclopaedia Britannica as an arbiter. He closed, as the lawyer read, that "Facebook needs to make a choice to do what's best for profits or do what's best for society. I believe there's a way to do both."

Sandberg rejected the trade-off. "I think people long asserted and continued to that there was a trade-off between user safety and profits. And that's I think exactly the opposite. what was good for user safety was always good for profits," she said.

She had forwarded the email to Schrage and others. His reply of November 16, 2016, read in court, began: "I think we all agree" - "except perhaps for Mark" - "on the importance and utility of user visible controls and signals about accuracy and truthfulness of information. And these should apply to Holocaust denial as well." Sandberg said the disagreement was narrower than it looked. "I think what Mark didn't agree on at that moment, even though he changed his mind later, was on Holocaust denial."

She set out the distinction Facebook used at the time. "If Holocaust, if you view Holocaust denial as hate, it had to come down. I viewed Holocaust denial always as hate," she said. The other view treated it as historical misinformation, comparable to denying the Civil War or the French Revolution. "We took down hate. We didn't take down false," Sandberg said, explaining that removing false claims would leave people believing "the last thing that was said." Asked how to tell the two apart, she answered: "I I don't think you can, which is eventually my why we did take Holocaust denial down." She confirmed that in 2016 a statement that the Holocaust did not happen would not have been removed: "That is correct."

Fact-checkers and Community Notes

Sandberg testified before the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on September 5, 2018, after preparation by the same internal groups. In that testimony she said Facebook partnered with third-party fact-checking organisations to limit the spread of articles rated false. In the deposition she explained why the work went outside the company. "I think it would have been exerting too much power for one company and our employees to be deciding truth," she said, adding that "We were not a fact-checking organization."

Asked how Facebook knew it had enough checkers for nearly three billion daily users, she answered: "We never tried to check all the information coming across the platform every day." Only a small portion was checked - content reaching many people or referred because someone thought it false. On a programme that exempted some accounts from removal, she said "I remember there were people whose content wasn't deleted and that was public figures," but did not remember whether it was called X-Check.

She rejected the suggestion that Facebook promised to eradicate misinformation. "I believe we tried to reduce it but not eradicate it and not all," she said. On the 2025 change, she said "I am aware that Facebook exited the third-party factchecking program, but I don't believe they were employees," and agreed that "terminated the contracts" was more accurate than "fired." She said she was not familiar with Community Notes, the user-written system that replaced the checkers, "and I'm no longer at the company."

Ads held to a stricter standard

The last exchange before the cross-examination concerned a Newsroom post of July 8, 2020, in which Sandberg wrote "We've gone beyond existing hate speech protections to ban ads that are divisive and include fear-mongering statements." She confirmed it, and added a line of direct relevance to advertisers: "We were always more more restrictive in the content of ads than we were in the content of posts." She also said "I believe hate speech should be taken down," and that freedom of speech should not be used as an excuse not to remove content.

Why the testimony matters for marketers

Facebook built its advertising business on a distinction Sandberg repeated throughout: advertisers choose an audience, and Facebook delivers the ad without handing over names or data. That distinction was the substance of her January 2019 post and her January 30, 2019 earnings call remark, "We don't sell your data and we don't tell advertisers who you are." The jury did not find that Facebook sold data. It found that statements framed this way, alongside promises about user control and app audits, misled the people who saw them.

The deposition shows how those statements were produced: scripted, reviewed by legal, rehearsed in rooms of colleagues, and in at least one case tested against alternatives with audiences. Sandberg described that process as a way to make statements "clear and understood." For the state, it was evidence that the wording was chosen for its effect. For any company that speaks publicly about data, the record shows how the preparation behind a statement can become evidence in its own right.

The penalty that followed was counted per audience member. The October 21 judgment set the penalty at $25 billion after finding that more than $219 billion was warranted, with interest at 15% a year. Meta has said it will appeal, and its quarterly report on Form 10-Q says it has accrued an amount for the loss without disclosing the figure. The penalty landed on the same day Meta reported a 26% rise in advertising revenue. Cambridge Analytica has produced other settlements: a $50 million judgment in California in March 2026 over developer data access and a $190 million shareholder settlement rooted in the same failures.

What the video does not establish matters as well. It shows only the portions of the August 15, 2025 session that were played in court, and it leaves several of the lawyer's figures - 87 million users, 270,000 survey takers, 700 developers reviewed, 200 shut down, a 1.9 million to 2.1 million user decline - as questions Sandberg neither confirmed nor rejected. Her answers on app vetting were statements of uncertainty, not denials, and the document that listed the gaps was one she said she had never seen and could not vouch for.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer from 2008 to 2022, questioned by a lawyer for the State of New Mexico, identified in the video as Ms. McGinn, and briefly by a second, unnamed lawyer. The case is New Mexico's action against Meta Platforms, brought by Attorney General Raúl Torrez.

What: A 1 hour, 28 minute edited video deposition in which Sandberg defended Facebook's "we don't sell" statements, said she could not explain how the API shared data, answered "I don't know" to six propositions about gaps in app developer vetting between 2012 and 2018, and explained Facebook's 2016 policy of removing hate but not falsehoods such as Holocaust denial.

When: The deposition was played to the jury on September 14, 2026, and published on YouTube on September 28, 2026. The deposition itself was recorded on August 15, 2025, according to the timestamp in the footage. The jury returned its verdict on September 25, 2026, and the judge set a $25 billion penalty on October 21, 2026.

Where: The First Judicial District Court for Santa Fe County, New Mexico, in case D-101-CV-2021-00132, with the video on the New Mexico Attorney General's YouTube channel.

Why: Sandberg authored six of the 29 statements the jury assessed, and all six were among those it found misleading. Her testimony shows how Facebook prepared and tested its public privacy messaging, a process that became central to a penalty counted per member of the audience that heard it.