A jury in Santa Fe found Meta liable for 43 million individual violations of New Mexico's consumer protection laws. Judge Francis J. Mathew then ordered the company to pay $25 billion — the largest single-state verdict against a tech company in American history. The original potential penalty was $219 billion, which is roughly $20 billion more than Meta's entire annual revenue.
The man who made it happen got his political start with $107,000 from George Soros.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed the suit over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which a third-party personality quiz harvested data from 87 million Facebook profiles to generate targeted political ads during the 2016 election. Cambridge Analytica dissolved in 2018. Forty-eight other states settled with Facebook and moved on. Torrez didn't.
What started as a data-privacy case became something else entirely during trial. Torrez used the courtroom to attack Meta's decision to abandon its internal fact-checker program in favor of the community notes model — the same system Elon Musk's X uses. In his own words during the trial, Torrez complained that "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."
That's the real target. Not a data breach from a decade ago. The content moderation shift.
Meta's former chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan had explained the rationale plainly: "We've seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context." Mark Zuckerberg himself told the House Judiciary Committee that the Biden administration had "repeatedly pressured" the company to "censor" information during Covid-19, and said Meta was "ready to push back if something like this happens again."
So a company tries to stop censoring its own users, and a state attorney general uses a consumer protection statute to punish them for it.
Meta attorney C.J. Mahoney put it bluntly: "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. At its core this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online." Mahoney added that Meta is "confident we will prevail on appeal."
Lawyer Jordan Sekulow was more direct: "New Mexico's Attorney General should not dictate what Americans can say online or use massive financial penalties to pressure companies into censorship."
Torrez's Soros ties aren't a footnote. In 2016, the New Mexico Safety and Justice PAC — a branch of Soros's national network of PACs that bankrolled progressive prosecutors in more than a dozen cities — received a single $107,000 contribution from Soros. The PAC spent $92,527 on media production and ad buys supporting Torrez's campaign for Bernalillo County District Attorney. Torrez won. He later admitted to meeting "daily" with other Democratic attorneys general to strategize lawsuits during the Trump administration.
The pattern is familiar: Soros funds a prosecutor, the prosecutor climbs to state AG, and then the AG weaponizes the office against political targets. What's new is the dollar figure and the mechanism. A $25 billion penalty for switching from government-approved fact-checkers to community-driven content moderation isn't a consumer protection action. It's a price tag on free speech, reported the Washington Free Beacon via Conservative Review.
Forty-eight states settled. One state's Soros-funded AG held out, turned a dead data scandal into a live censorship case, and walked away with a $25 billion verdict. Meta says it will appeal. The judgment stands until it does.
