New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez brought a message of child safety to Farmington Tuesday during a town hall at the Farmington Civic Center.
“I have a lot of irons in the fire I’m trying to fix” when it comes to “protecting kids, victims and vulnerable people” from “corporate and government malfeasance,” Torrez told the Tri-City Record about some issues for which his office has been earning national attention.
Torrez became the first AG in the nation to sue social media giant Meta Platforms Inc. for not having safeguards in place that protect children.
“We have a problem in New Mexico, where we kind of let others lead, and I wanted to show people in the agency there is another way of doing things,” he said, adding while it was a risk to take on Meta, his winning lawsuit “set precedent” and now has created “a blueprint for the rest of the country.”
A jury found that Meta committed 75,000 violations of New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and the court further ruled that Meta’s platforms constitute a public nuisance in the state.
First Judicial District Judge Bryan Biedschield entered a final judgment ordering Meta to pay $567 million to address the youth mental health crisis, along with the jury’s civil penalty of $375, which brought the company’s financial exposure to $942 million.
Biedschield ruled that the legislature will determine how to utilize those funds in New Mexico, and Torrez said his office plans to “build out a comprehensive social media bill” which would update consumer protection laws to stop social media companies from bringing harm to people through the digital economy and data brokering.
Torrez, who worked in technology company before becoming an attorney, said the actions of these companies are “not accidental.”
“No one is giving anyone is this world something for free without value – the value is your time and attention,” Torrez said, adding that the companies piece together information about an individual, create a digital avatar and see what they can sell to you.
“Most people don’t realize they are caught in the matrix,” he said.
Torrez characterized social media as a “a surveillance system of capitalism” in which we have “traded away more of our private personal information than most people even realize.”
People become addicted to it and “it’s impossible to unwind what we’ve done,” he said, adding these seem like free products but in reality, “you’re the product. They’re extracting more value out of you than you realize.”
This also has had a negative impact on children from a decline in literacy and writing skills, to not protecting them from online predators, which was the focus of New Mexico’s lawsuit.
Parents don’t realize the dangers of giving smartphones to children, according to Torrez, who said, “You’re handing an opportunity to a predator without oversight when you hand them that phone.”
The attorney general also told individuals at the meeting that phones should not be in schools.
“I feel if we went back to a place where the phone was in the kitchen and in the principal’s office, we would be in a much better place,” Torrez said. “We are placing an entire generation at risk by handing out these devices.”
Since becoming the attorney general, Torrez has focused on “child safety first,” which he said has been a missing element in many areas including CYFD, which he has said is “an agency in desperate need of a comprehensive overhaul.”
Once again earning national attention, he spoke out against the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department when it forced a 15-year-old boy to walk alone across the border into Mexico to be reunited with a parent that had allegedly abused him.
“At this point we don’t have a clear view of his situation,” Torrez said of the boy, who asked to not be returned to his mother but was.
Torrez also has worked on a victim’s rights bill that he hopes to see approved by the legislature.
It provides a “commitment to think about how we treat survivors in the criminal justice system,” he said.
“New Mexico has a sad distinction” of being one of the only states where it’s allowed for “sexual assault survivors and child victims to be subjected to pretrial interviews before the trial occurs,” Torrez said, adding these interviews often are “intended to humiliate them and renew the trauma they’ve had in the past.”
Thinking about survivors led Torrez to open his own investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and what happened at Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, which is referenced 13,000 times in the files.
He sought records from the Epstein files about the ranch, making 10 Inspection of Public Records Act requests, but has been denied access.
What he did receive was 31 pages “that included nothing of relevance or importance to the investigation,” Torrez said in an Aug. 5 news conference.
Not receiving the records has impeded and slowed down the work of his office’s criminal prosecutors, the attorney general said.
Torrez filed a lawsuit on Aug. 5 against the U.S. Justice Department and Todd Blanche for their failure to release records from the Epstein files that pertain to Zorro Ranch in New Mexico.
On Wednesday, also visited Gallup where he visited the Gallup Police Department to provide an update on the New Mexico Department of Justice’s Crime Gun Intelligence Center, which is helping to solve gun crimes in both McKinley and San Juan Counties.
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