New Mexico’s Attorney General on next steps after beating Meta

Attorney General Raúl Torrez (D-NM) spent his early days as a prosecutor rooting out sex crimes and child exploitation in the darkest corners of the internet. That experience helped him prevail over Meta after a jury ordered the company to pay $375 million for failing to protect kids from sex predators. His victory represents a significant moment for kids’ online safety advocates. He’s the first state prosecutor to secure a ruling against a social media giant by making the argument that the platform’s design has harmed kids. This followed a sting operation to uncover child sex criminals on Meta apps that his office dubbed “Operation MetaPhile.” The win came shortly before another verdict against Meta and Google-owned YouTube out of Los Angeles. Both decisions are helping to usher in a new moment of legal and regulatory reckoning for Big Tech. Now Attorney General Torrez has a new mission: harnessing the verdict to force Meta to redesign its platforms, whether through a court order or legislation in Congress. “If I can shut down spaces that enable predation on a large scale, then I have an obligation to do so,” he said. “When you’ve dealt with child victims, as I have in my career, and you know what that does to them, there’s no excuse for it. There’s nothing I’m going to refrain from doing, in terms of trying to make those spaces safer.”