New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez’s big win against Meta last week means huge risks for every successful company in America; if this decision holds up, the same garbage-lawsuit model could destroy any business.
It’s a victory for speech policing, too.
A Sante Fe jury found Meta guilty of 43 million violations of state consumer-protection law by buying a whole series of absurd arguments, including:
- Policy vows that Facebook is “no place for hate,” and claims by the likes of CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the company had robust systems to determine whether content should be taken down became false when Facebook shifted from using so-called “fact checkers” to community notes for judgment purposes.
- That this allowed violent, or merely inaccurate, content to proliferate.
- That all of New Mexico’s 2 million people could have heard each of two dozen such “false statements”; at up to $5,000 per violation, that means penalties of over $219 billion — which the judge dropped to just $25 billion.
That’s more than twice the state’s annual budget; Torrez is bragging that he has funded education for decades with this victory.
Mind you, New Mexico’s lawyers didn’t actually show that terrible content actually proliferated, nor that anyone anywhere was injured in any way by any of this.
All they could point to was a political consulting firm’s potential abuse of Facebook data to better target online ads in favor of Donald Trump in 2016, plus another similarly mild “data breach” — both of which the company later ensured wouldn’t happen again.
New Mexico’s insanely ambulance-chaser-friendly laws, plus its juries’ and courts’ strong inclination to award huge judgments, have rightly earned it a ranking as one of the nation’s worst “judicial hellholes.”
Plus, Torrez’s office didn’t even have to argue the case: It contracted the work out to private tort attorneys in exchange for a cut of the fines — over $10 billion if the decision holds up.
Oh, and: To appeal, Meta must post bond of 2½ times the judgment — over $60 billion.
The particular argument here was extremely odious, all but insisting that consumers can only be protected by some “anti-misinformation” — that is, Big Brother controls on speech.
Surprise, surprise: Torrez is one of the “Soros prosecutors,” initially elected thanks to funding from the lefty billionaire to quit fighting regular crime and instead pursue an extremist progressive agenda with lawfare instead of legislation.
But the bottom line is a threat to any business in America: You can be hauled into a New Mexico kangaroo court on some cockamamie theory, with zero evidence anyone ever suffered as a result, and fined more than the value of your entire company — and unable to appeal unless you can cough up even more cash to post bond.
Obviously, the threat is most dire to successful tech companies and other industries seen as villains in the strongly Democratic state: For them, New Mexico law is an even bigger menace than the European Union’s statutes, which at least limit the extent of (utterly unjust) fines.
Luckily for the rest of the US private sector, Meta has the resources and the will to fight back all the way to the US Supreme Court if necessary.
Pray the company triumphs completely, or New Mexico could wind up choking the entire US economy.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
