Attorney General Behind Historic Meta Fine Picks Next Target

A state attorney general named his next target after successfully obtaining a historic-level fine against Meta.

New Mexico District Court Judge Francis J. Mathew on Wednesday ordered Meta to pay $25 billion after a jury found that the company misled users about its privacy practices. Democratic New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said that the company mishandled New Mexicans’ personal information. Now, the attorney general said that he may focus on controlling artificial intelligence.

“Anyone in artificial intelligence, people who are building products that they can’t control, people who are making representations in the marketplace about what a product does or doesn’t do, or how it uses or doesn’t use specific types of consumer data, we are going to be watching, and we are prepared to do this again. The message should be received in Silicon Valley that this is not the end, it’s just the beginning,” Torrez told Politico on Thursday.

Torrez’s team did not respond to a Daily Caller News Foundation comment request.

This is not the first time that Torrez has moved to police AI.

The New Mexico attorney general and state Democratic Rep. Linda Serrato in early October announced the Frontier Artificial Intelligence Safety and Accountability Act, a bill that would mandate that the largest AI developers disclose risks associated with their models and allow New Mexico to sue for damage caused by rogue AI models, according to an Oct. 1 New Mexico Justice Department press release.

Torrez and 25 attorneys general called for federal oversight of safety testing and standards and international cooperation to pace AI development, according to a New Mexico Department of Justice release.

The New Mexico lawsuit sued Meta after a whistleblower revealed that Facebook collected and shared people’s information with political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, per Politico.

Most states have their own consumer protection laws and New Mexico’s victory may provide an example for other states that want to police such conduct.

Censoring Speech or Consumer Protection?

“New Mexico didn’t sue over content or speech, where tech companies have built legal shields. It sued over deception: Meta told users one thing about its privacy practices and did another, and the state had consumer protection laws to meet the moment,” Nidhi Hegde, executive director of the American Economics Liberties Project, told Politico.

“Meta got dinged for what we would generally call poor business, like deceiving their consumers,” Kathleen Farley, vice president of litigation for the Chamber of Progress, told the DCNF.

Those opposed to the court’s ruling contend that it may stifle free speech, as much of the court’s proceedings focused on Meta’s inability to curb hate speech and disinformation, which the DCNF reported.

“This decision is a major threat to free speech. It would allow a few lawyers in a few states to regulate speech online in violation of federal law and the First Amendment. I hope Meta sticks to its guns and appeals this decision to protect not only its own rights, but everyone’s,” Casey Mattox, a constitutional attorney and vice president of legal strategy for Stand Together, told the DCNF on Thursday.

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to 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,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s Chief Legal Officer, said in a statement to the DCNF.

The judgment for the case found that “Facebook promises regarding the prevalence and nature of misinformation and hate speech on the platform and assured the public that the users on the platform would, no matter who they were, be treated equally. The jury found those statements to be false as well,” according to the court’s conclusions of law.

“Facebook made repeated statements to the public respecting its ability to identify and remove hate speech and misinformation despite knowing those statements to be deceptive,” the court’s findings of facts stated.

However, not everyone seems to believe this case centers on free speech and combatting hate speech and misinformation.

“I am a First Amendment lawyer and I do not approve of what the Biden administration did there, but to announce this to that over aggressive PR [public relations] spin that is in and of itself misleading and perhaps that’s how we got here in the first place,” Farley explained.

“This is not about things that other people were saying on the platform. This is statements that [Meta CEO] Mark Zuckerberg made. These are statements that Sheryl Sandberg made. These are statements that Meta made on their web pages, explaining how your data was used,” she added.

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