A New Mexico judge has ordered Meta to pay a staggering $25 billion in penalties, a ruling that could empower the state's radical-Left Attorney General, Raúl Torrez, to force social media platforms back into the discredited censorship regime they abandoned after the 2024 election.
This breathtaking financial penalty, more than double New Mexico's state budget, is not merely about a data breach. What began as a case targeting Meta over the Cambridge Analytica data incident was strategically broadened by Torrez to attack the company’s content moderation policies, specifically demanding a return to politically motivated 'fact-checking'.
New Mexico District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew ultimately sided with Torrez, reducing a potential $219 billion penalty to a still-insurmountable $25 billion. Meta immediately pushed back, asserting the ruling makes it impossible to conduct business in the state.
“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,” Meta attorney C.J. Mahoney stated. “At its core this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.”
Legal expert Jordan Sekulow echoed this concern, highlighting the clear intent behind the astronomical fine. “New Mexico’s Attorney General should not dictate what Americans can say online or use massive financial penalties to pressure companies into censorship,” Sekulow warned.
The political motivation driving Torrez, a figure whose career was jumpstarted by liberal billionaire George Soros, became glaringly obvious during the trial. Torrez openly expressed his disapproval of Meta’s shift from internal 'fact-checkers' to a more public 'community notes' system, complaining it was done precisely because of potential conservative wins.
“When Donald Trump wins the presidency again a second time … Facebook announces we’re getting rid of their fact-check program, and we’re just going to switch to what everybody else has — the community notes program,” Torrez reportedly lamented during the proceedings. This astonishing admission reveals a public official attempting to use the courts to control online speech based on anticipated election outcomes, and it shows the clear political agenda at play. Torrez has even admitted to meeting “daily” with other Democrat attorneys general to strategize national wins against the Trump administration.
Meta, for its part, explained that it adopted the community notes system after observing its successful implementation on Elon Musk’s X platform, which empowers the public to add context to potentially misleading posts. This approach moves the power of content discernment from a centralized, often biased, corporate arbiter to the broader community, aligning with a more American vision of open discourse.
The history of government pressure on social media is well-documented. Mark Zuckerberg previously disclosed that Meta was “repeatedly pressured” by the Biden administration to censor information during the Covid-19 pandemic. He also revealed the company actively suppressed stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop weeks before the 2020 presidential election, a story initially dismissed by the Left as "Russian disinformation" but later verified as true, exposing the Biden family's dubious overseas business dealings.
These actions, driven by a radical left that fears truth and open debate, represent a profound threat to free speech and a transparent election process. As Ben Shapiro once argued regarding social media censorship, “This idea of a broader free speech movement cannot be a temporary change just for purposes of pleasing President Trump. A commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whoever is in the office.”
Torrez’s outrageous demand and the judge’s compliant ruling are not about protecting data; they are a thinly veiled attempt to resurrect the era of Big Tech censorship, dictated by politically motivated actors, to silence dissenting voices and control the narrative. This is a battle for the very soul of free expression and the future of America First values online.
