Q&A with New Mexico AG Raúl Torrez about the New Mexico and LA social media trials, Big Tech's “Big Tobacco” moment, what it means for Congress, and more
Presented by With help from Aaron Mak — New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez spent his early days …
Context & Ripple Effects
Torrez’s discussion extends New Mexico’s earlier case alleging Meta enabled predation on Facebook and Instagram, a dispute that put platform-design and child-safety claims at the center of state enforcement. New Mexico’s case against Meta supplies the concrete legal backdrop for his broader “Big Tobacco” framing.
The Los Angeles proceedings add a second venue to that pressure: a lawyer involved in the case was subsequently profiled after beating Meta and Google in the LA social-media case. Together, the cases make the congressional implications less abstract by testing claims against major platforms in court.
First-order effects
- New Mexico’s attorney general can use the ongoing trials to elevate its platform-safety allegations from a state case into a national policy argument aimed at Congress and Big Tech.
- Meta and Google face further reputational and legal scrutiny around how their social products affect users, while the LA result gives plaintiffs’ lawyers a concrete litigation reference point.
Second-order effects
- Other state attorneys general may find the New Mexico and LA proceedings more useful as templates for consumer-protection or platform-safety claims, extending a state-enforcement role that previously reached major tech firms. State AG scrutiny of Facebook, Google, and Amazon has long offered an alternative path when federal action is uncertain.
- Congress faces more pressure to consider whether litigation-driven findings warrant legislative responses, rather than leaving platform-safety standards to company policy and case-by-case lawsuits.
Third-order effects
- If similar cases continue to advance, platform governance could increasingly be shaped through overlapping state actions and civil trials, not solely through federal legislation or agency enforcement.
- The “Big Tobacco” comparison signals a potential shift from debating isolated content decisions to scrutinizing whether product design and internal incentives create recurring public harms; whether courts accept that framing remains decisive.
The trend: State-led litigation is becoming a parallel mechanism for setting the boundaries of Big Tech accountability when national rules remain contested.