Judge Orders Meta To Pay Blue State Billions, Empowers Democrat To Reinstate Censorship Regime

A New Mexico judge is ordering Meta to pay a massive $25 billion in penalties on Wednesday, an order that may empower the state’s far-Left attorney general to force the platform to reinstate censorship tools that it did away with after the 2024 election.

The case initially targeted Meta, the parent company of Facebook, over a data breach involving political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, but the scope was broadened by Attorney General Raúl Torrez to criticize the social media giant’s content moderation strategy, The Daily Wire reported earlier this month.

The New Mexico district court judge Francis J. Mathew ultimately sided with Torrez and mentioned Facebook’s content moderation shortcomings in his ruling. The company was facing potential penalties of roughly $219 billion, nearly $20 billion more than the company’s total revenue from last year. Mathew later reduced the penalty to $25 billion—an amount still more than twice New Mexico’s state budget. 

Meta argued Wednesday’s ruling makes it impossible for the company to do business in the state, signaling its belief that the ultimate goal was to institute “new rules for what people can say online.”

“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 said in a statement. “At its core this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online.” 

Lawyer Jordan Sekulow echoes the sentiment, saying the massive financial penalty was an attempt to pressure Facebook back into censorship.

“New Mexico’s Attorney General should not dictate what Americans can say online or use massive financial penalties to pressure companies into censorship,” Sekulow said.

During the trial, as was first reported by The Daily Wire, Torrez made clear he did not approve of Meta switching its content moderation strategy from internal fact-checkers to a “community notes” system. Torrez claimed the company “bragged about” its fact checking strategy but abandoned it after Trump won the 2024 presidential election.

“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,” he complained during the trial. 

Torrez, who owes his political start to liberal billionaire George Soros, has admitted to meeting “daily” to strategize with other Democrat attorneys general about how to get national wins during the Trump administration.

Meta said it switched over to community notes after seeing the success of the approach on Elon Musk’s social platform, X. “We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” said Meta’s former chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan. 

By turning over fact-checking to the public, the public helps inform what’s true and what’s not, rather than the platform. Previously, Zuckerberg disclosed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that Meta’s old content strategy censored information. Zuckerberg revealed he was “repeatedly pressured” by the Biden administration to “censor” information during the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, Zuckerberg said the company was “ready to push back if something like this happens again.” 

Along with Covid-19, Zuckerberg also revealed the company stifled posts around the Hunter Biden laptop controversy just weeks before the 2020 presidential election. The Left claimed it was a Russian hoax, even though it was later verified that emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop were real and revealed he had used his father’s power for business interests overseas.

The Daily Wire fought against the social media censorship regime, and celebrated Facebook for its policy change, with Ben Shapiro arguing that it must be a permanent change.

“This idea of a broader free speech movement cannot be a temporary change just for purposes of pleasing President Trump,” Shapiro wrote last year. “A commitment to free speech by social media needs to last longer than whoever is in the office.”

The biggest threat yet to the new policies may be Torrez.

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