On October 21, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay the state $25 billion for violating its Unfair Practices Act. That penalty is massive. But the bigger problem is how the judgment treats the gap between a platform’s moderation promises and its imperfect enforcement as deception, penalizing platforms for moderating protected speech and sidestepping Section 230 and the First Amendment. If nothing is done to stop these attacks on free expression, we will all lose access to online platforms, big and small, as we know them.
New Mexico Is Effectively Enforcing Speech Codes
So what did Meta do that the court said warranted billions in fines? While most of the case concerned privacy issues related to Cambridge Analytica, another major basis was that Meta had supposedly deceived users by allowing misinformation, hate speech, and violent content on its platforms after claiming it would take down such content.
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Number 33 in our series of occasional roundups on election law and policy, this time focusing mostly on White House and Department of Justice attempts to meddle in the midterms, and countermeasures by states and others:
- Last Wednesday a federal judge told the Department of Justice threats of criminal prosecution against California election officials “must stop.” He probably didn’t mean DOJ should roll out those threats to state election administrators nationwide. DOJ has hinted that it may charge officials with “aiding and abetting” voter fraud if they decline to cull ballots on DOJ’s say-so. But Samantha Trepel writes at Just Security that prosecutors would be highly unlikely to pin such a rap on the officials since, to aid and abet, “as explained in the Ninth Circuit’s model jury instructions, “[i]t is not enough that the defendant… unknowingly or unintentionally did things that were helpful” to the commission of a crime. “The evidence must show beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant acted with the knowledge and intention of helping the crime’s commission.”
- Read the rest of this post →
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Are you graduating from law school in 2027, or are you a lawyer with roughly 0–2 years of legal experience? Do you want to write briefs on the most important cases of the year to defend individual liberty and robust constitutional rights? Then, apply to be a legal associate at the Cato Institute for the 2027–2028 term.
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New research about the effects of post-2008 bank regulation confirms what I’ve argued since the financial crisis: increased bank regulation will often lead to more ills.
The study looked at the effect of
two major regulatory changes that took effect in 2013: the phased implementation of Basel III capital requirements and stress tests required under the Dodd–Frank Act. … [S]ince construction loans are relatively risky and require substantial capital under these rules, the policies may have encouraged the largest banks to reduce this type of lending.
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Recently, the American Primary Aluminum Association issued a report claiming as proof that the 50 percent Section 232 “national security” tariffs should stay in place. Some of the report withstands scrutiny. High-purity aluminum matters for military hardware, and the report notes that no smelter in the United States or any NATO country can make it (p. 2). Aluminum also makes up a small share of costs for most finished goods, so the per-unit price effects are relatively modest. The defensible version of this argument is a very narrow, national security case. Yet the report does not make the case. Three problems stand out.
Are the Tariffs Working? The Report Can’t Say
The report lays out a simple test: tariffs should raise aluminum prices and spur investment, and “If they do not, they are not working” (p. 16). At the same time, the report waves away the costs and argues that the tariffs’ price effect is small. It says the tariff shows up only in the Midwest Premium, the US delivery premium on top of the London Metal Exchange (p. 3), but also that the premium tracks global conditions rather than tariff coverage—and the recent spike predates the 2025 tariff escalation (p. 16).
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New US Census Bureau statistics released October 29 show that the immigrant share of the US population remained essentially flat from July 2024 to July 2025, but the Latin American immigrant population fell by nearly half a million. Despite a significant increase in immigration during President Biden’s term, the immigrant share of the US population has grown more slowly since 2010 than during any comparable period since the 1960s.
- In 2025, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) estimated that there were 50.4 million immigrants, legal and illegal, in the United States—up from 50.2 million in 2024.
- In 2025, the share of the US population who were immigrants, legal or illegal, was 14.7 percent—effectively unchanged from 14.8 percent in 2024.
- From 2010 to 2025, the immigrant share grew by 1.8 percentage points, an average of just 0.12 points per year, the slowest pace since the 1960s.
- Since 2006, effectively all immigrant population growth has come from Asia (47 percent), Latin America (41 percent), and Africa (13 percent).
- Without high immigration rates going forward, the total US population will decline.
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The shabby practice of recruiting decoy candidates is old hat in American politics, although it is unusual for it to surface in a race for an office as high-profile as that of a US senator. New York Times reporting has now confirmed what I agree with National Review’s Dan McLaughlin is the year’s least surprising scoop: Democratic operatives recruited an obscure schoolteacher named Daniel J. Sullivan to appear on the ballot alongside incumbent Republican Sen. Daniel S. Sullivan. Narrowing the risk of voter confusion, the ballot added “Incumbent” and “registered Republican” alongside the name of the “real” Dan.
What legal issues are in play here?
To begin with, nothing about this changes the meritless nature of the Trump DOJ’s federal lawsuit, discussed in this space last week.
Some have demanded criminal prosecution, although at this point I have not seen anyone point to any criminal law, Alaska or federal, that prohibits the central act involved here, recruiting a same-name candidate. Focus would then naturally shift to the question of whether criminal laws were broken in the course of ancillary acts, such as making false sworn representations or paying campaign actors who cannot lawfully be paid.