Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, may have to pay a historic $219 billion fine in part for not doing more to censor the free and legal speech of American citizens, including Joe Rogan, than it already did. On Friday, a Santa Fe jury found Meta liable for deceiving New Mexicans when it promised greater censorship.
“They’re using this litigation to achieve indirectly what they could not achieve directly through government censorship,” Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, told Public. “Many people in the United States are trying to duplicate [the EU censorship] effort and use the judiciary as opposed to the executive branch to achieve the same goals.”
The law allows a judge to fine Meta up to $5,000 per violation. Attorney General Raúl Torrez says the total could be $219 billion, with up to $76 billion of that for the 15,293,184 alleged violations in the three speech categories.
The verdict comes amid bipartisan demands for AI regulation and calls from governments in the UK, Europe, Australia, and other nations for greater government censorship of legal speech online. “We’re going to have to create new town squares,” threatened Obama, “where everybody is having a common dialogue with certain rules. And that becomes even more important as technology accelerates and AI and deepfakes and all kinds of nonsense is coming.”
And, in two weeks, Sony will release a new Aaron Sorkin film that portrays Mark Zuckerberg as a villain for supporting free speech and falsely suggests that the censorship being demanded is to protect children. In the trailer, Zuckerberg says, “People can post what they want. We’re not the ref. We’re the public square.” To which a character played by stand-up comic Bill Burr says, “Are you crazy? You’re like a crossing guard standing in front of a school, but you’re not doing anything with your arms, so the cars are just plowing down the children.”