By The Daily Wire (World News) | Created at 2026-10-02 18:21:01 | Updated at 2026-10-02 19:51:30
6 hours ago
New Mexico’s liberal attorney general, who rose to prominence with the backing of liberal billionaire George Soros, appears to be using a data breach by Facebook to force the social media platform to reinstate content moderation policies it abandoned after the 2024 election.
A New Mexico jury last month found Meta, the parent company of Facebook, liable for making deceptive statements about millions of data breaches. The state’s attorney general Raúl Torrez has said it will seek the maximum $5,000 for each of the 43 million liability cases, which would amount to hundreds of billions of dollars.
During the trial, however, Torrez signaled that he’s going for more than a financial penalty and intends to use the potential penalty to push Facebook to backtrack on changes to its fact-checking systems.
“And now I want to go to the last question,” said the Soros-backed Torrez during the trial. He proceeded to fault Facebook for switching its strategy to address misinformation from fact-checkers to a “community notes” system similar to other large social media platforms. Torrez said Facebook “bragged about” their old strategy in 2022 but “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.”
Meta announced its new content moderation strategy, using community notes instead of moderating content in a partnership with fact-checkers, on January 7, 2025.
“We’ve seen this approach work on X — where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context,” said Meta’s Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan.
Meta said its previous approach had “gone too far” and censored too much content.
“I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO. “We’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”
The changes were met with consternation from liberal critics, who cheered on Facebook when it used content moderation to punish outlets like The Daily Wire.
Zuckerberg disclosed in a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that Meta was “repeatedly pressured” by the Biden administration to “censor” information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Torrez’s political rise received a boost in 2016 when George Soros donated $107,000 to New Mexico Safety and Justice, an independent super PAC supporting his bid for Bernalillo County district attorney. By early June, the group had raised and spent more than Torrez’s Democratic primary opponent’s campaign.
Jordan Sekulow, the executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice, told The Daily Wire that Torrez is taking advantage of the lawsuit to attack free speech.
“Torrez inherited a privacy lawsuit and turned it into a threat to the First Amendment,” Sekulow said. “No politician should be able to use a consumer protection statute to tell a private company which political speech to take down.”
“If he wins this case, every American who posts something a liberal doesn’t like loses,” he added.
Constitutional attorney Casey Mattox echoed the statement, saying the case was a threat to free speech.
“The free speech threat you aren’t paying attention to is the one where New Mexico’s Left-wing attorney general is trying to lawfare Meta into censoring more speech online through the guise of ‘consumer protection.’”
The Meta lawsuit, filed in 2021 by Torrez’s predecessor, Hector Balderas, followed revelations that Cambridge Analytica had obtained information from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app. Cambridge Analytica is a political consulting firm tied to President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Torrez broadened the lawsuit, which initially focused on a data breach that comprised over 87 million customers’ data, to include the company’s new content moderation strategy, arguing the company has made deceptive statements on “misinformation.” It is not clear why Torrez expanded the lawsuit beyond the privacy breach. Torrez did not respond to The Daily Wire’s request for comment.
The jury also found Facebook’s statements that it did not profit from misinformation or hate speech, and that it removed harmful misinformation to be “willfully deceptive.” Jurors did, however, reject the state’s claims that Meta misled consumers about its efforts “to remove harmful content and its fact-checking practices.”
“Meta’s platforms are forums for free expression,” a spokesperson for Meta said after the verdict came out. “We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community. This means prioritizing free speech, protecting our users’ information and giving them control over their data.”
Judge Francis Mathew, who presided over the case, has not ruled on how much Meta will owe in civil penalties. Under civil law, Mathew can award up to $5,000 per violation and jurors found Meta had 43 million violations.
“Let this be a warning to every technology company doing business in our state,” Torrez said.
