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

A New Mexico district court judge, Francis J. Mathew, has ordered Meta to pay $25 billion in penalties, siding with state Attorney General Raúl Torrez in a case that began over a Cambridge Analytica data breach. Daily Wire reports the outcome could let Torrez push the company to restore the fact-checking tools it dropped after the 2024 election.

Torrez widened the lawsuit to attack how Facebook moderates content. The company had faced exposure of roughly $219 billion, which Mathew cut to $25 billion, still more than twice New Mexico's state budget. Meta attorney C. J. Mahoney said the ruling makes operating in the state nearly impossible and called the suit a tax on speech. Lawyer Jordan Sekulow likewise said an attorney general should not use financial penalties to pressure companies toward censorship.

At trial, Torrez objected that Meta replaced internal fact-checkers with community notes once Donald Trump won the presidency. Meta's former chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, said the company adopted the model after seeing it work on Elon Musk's platform X.

Summarized by PolitiKool from Daily Wire’s reporting. Read the full story at Daily Wire →