Soros-backed New Mexico AG behind $25B Meta lawsuit accused of seeking tax on speech

The jaw-dropping $25 billion penalty Meta was slapped with on Oct.21 is raising questions about New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s crackdown on the company’s privacy and content-moderation practices.

The massive fine could have a chilling effect on companies doing business in the state, as well as on free speech.Torrez — who entered into politics with a 2016 run for district attorney backed by more than $100,000 in spending from a George Soros-funded super PAC — has faced criticism during his tenure for prosecuting just half the criminal cases referred by law enforcement. But he has taken a far more aggressive approach to tech companies than violent criminals according to local reports.The Meta case, which was initially filed in 2021, came following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from millions of Facebook users was harvested by a third party without their knowledge.Last month, a jury found Meta liable for misleading users about its privacy and content-moderation practices and the staggering fine was announced this week.Meta plans to appeal the decision.”The jury didn’t make findings that any New Mexican heard or saw these statements, or was harmed by them,” Meta attorney Matthew Nicholson argued at the trialMeta’s chief legal officer, C.J.

Mahoney said in a statement Wednesday, “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.

We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”The violations carried penalties of up to $5,000 per violation, resulting in a calculation of more than $219 billion before the judge reduced the penalty to $25 billion.The staggering judgment would be a huge windfall for the state — given New Mexico’s $11 billion annual budget is less than half that.“For too long, powerful technology companies h...