Mark Zuckerberg admitted the Biden White House pressured Facebook to silence Americans during COVID.
When Trump won, Zuckerberg shut down the censorship machine Democrats had spent years building.
Now a Soros-backed attorney general found a way to drag Facebook back into censorship through a New Mexico courtroom.
New Mexico Jury Handed Torrez a $215 Billion Weapon in Meta Lawsuit
A New Mexico jury found Meta liable last month for deceptive statements across 43 million violations – each carrying a $5,000 maximum penalty under state law.
That math adds up to $215 billion, roughly the GDP of Portugal.
The lawsuit traces back to 2021, when New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez's predecessor sued Meta after Cambridge Analytica harvested personal data from as many as 87 million Facebook users through a third-party app.
Torrez inherited that case – and immediately expanded it.
He broadened the claims to include Facebook's content moderation decisions – specifically the company's January 2025 move to dump partisan fact-checkers in favor of community notes.
Meta's Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan said the company had seen the community notes approach work on X, "where they empower their community to decide when posts are potentially misleading and need more context."
The jury found Meta's statements about not profiting from misinformation "willfully deceptive" – but rejected the state's specific claims about Facebook's fact-checking practices outright.
Judge Francis Mathew has not yet ruled on the final penalty, and Meta has already said it will appeal.
The Real Play: Force Zuckerberg to Restore the Facebook Fact-Checkers He Fired
Torrez made his agenda explicit during the trial itself.
He attacked Zuckerberg's decision to drop fact-checkers, announced on January 7, 2025 – two weeks before Trump returned to the White House.
"When Donald Trump wins the presidency again a second time," Torrez said in open court, "…Facebook announces we're getting rid of their fact-check program."
Torrez isn't enforcing consumer protection law – he's threatening a private company into reversing a free-speech decision he doesn't like, under threat of a nine-figure fine.
Jordan Sekulow, executive director of the American Center for Law and Justice, called it out.
"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."
Sekulow added: "If he wins this case, every American who posts something a liberal doesn't like loses."
Casey Mattox, a constitutional attorney, said Torrez is attempting to "lawfare Meta into censoring more speech online through the guise of 'consumer protection.'"
Meta isn't retreating.
"Meta's platforms are forums for free expression," a company spokesperson said after the verdict.
"We have a First Amendment right to manage those platforms in a way we believe best serves the interests of our community."
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Zuckerberg revealed that Biden administration officials "repeatedly pressured" Meta to suppress content throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
When Zuckerberg ended the fact-checking regime in January 2025, Meta said the old approach had "gone too far."
"We're ready to push back if something like this happens again," he said.
New Mexico gave him a chance to prove it.
This Is How Democrats Use Lawfare to Bypass the First Amendment
Torrez didn't invent this – Biden's White House ran the same operation, just without a courtroom.
Biden's people used back-channel pressure to push Facebook into suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, COVID dissent, and content that challenged the official narrative.
When that became public and Zuckerberg walked it back, the left went looking for another door.
The $215 billion hammer is leverage – pay up or bring back the censors.
George Soros donated $107,000 in 2016 to back Torrez's first run for district attorney in New Mexico, knowing exactly the kind of prosecutor he was buying.
He doesn't fund campaigns to enforce the law – he funds them to make it.
The target here is Facebook's free-speech pivot – the single biggest corporate reversal on speech censorship since Twitter became X.
A ruling in Torrez's favor would not stay in New Mexico – it would hand every Democrat attorney general in the country the same template.
If Torrez wins, every conservative voice on Facebook is one attorney general away from silence.
Sources:
- Brecca Stoll, "How A Soros-Backed AG Is Using A Data Breach To Resurrect Facebook's Worst Practices," The Daily Wire, October 2, 2026.
- "Meta ordered to pay $375M after jury finds platform enabled child predators in landmark New Mexico case," Fox Business, March 25, 2026.
- "Meta Goes MAGA," American Center for Law and Justice, January 7, 2025.
