A Democratic attorney general whose political rise was boosted by over $100,000 from George Soros secured a $25 billion judgment against Meta on Wednesday — the largest in the history of mankind — in a case that charged Meta with misleading users about its privacy practices. A judge found the company guilty of 43 million violations, each of which carried a maximum $5,000 penalty.
The attorney general, Raúl Torrez, filed the case in the Santa Fe, an overwhelmingly Democratic city that voted for Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by a 49-point margin, 73.3 to 24.4 percent. Soros helped bankroll Torrez’s first political campaign in 2016 through the New Mexico Safety and Justice PAC, helping to propel him over his Democratic primary opponent Edmund Perea.
Torrez previously served as district attorney of Albuquerque, where he was criticized for prosecuting less than half of the violent crimes committed in the notoriously violent city.
The Meta case centered around a number of statements made by Meta executes that Torrez claimed were untrue, though he could not demonstrate that they caused any harm to anybody, including to New Mexico residents, or even that any New Mexico resident had ever heard any of the statements.
Among other things, the state assailed Meta for doing away with its fact-checking program, which was conducted by a set of partisan news outlets and fact-checkers, arguing that it was superior to the current community notes model and charging that Meta had eliminated it because it did not want President Donald Trump fact-checked. "They brag about their fact-checking partners," the state said in its closing argument. "This is in 2022. That’s what they say. That’s what they brag about. And then, because nobody likes being fact-checked, particularly people in power, 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 what everybody else has — the community notes program."
State District Court Judge Francis Mathew imposed the penalty following a jury verdict against Meta under New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act. The order carries 15 percent annual interest, equivalent to $3.75 billion a year on the initial penalty.
Meta says it will appeal the decision.
"At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online," the company’s chief legal officer, C.J. Mahoney, said.
The $25 billion dollar judgement dwarfs New Mexico’s annual state budget of $11.1 billion. The money would go to the New Mexico public school system, yielding approximately $85,000 per student.
