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Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

atg.wa.gov

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Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#31

Post by colinmhayes »

endisneigh wrote: post #8

How much money does meta even make from political ads? Why would they even want to deal with this?

My old coworkers had a story about this. Back in 2012 the romney campaign was spending so much money on facebook ads they couldn't be served fast enough. Coworker was told to turn off the "don't show me ads like this again" functionality for Romney so they could get more views. I don't have numbers, but it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#32

Post by TechBro8615 »

numair wrote: post #15

Quoted post unavailable.

This guy has a decade plus vendetta against Facebook [0] and posts in all these threads. While I respect that, I wouldn't read too much into this comment.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029872

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#33

Post by mszcz »

msbarnett wrote: post #7
hedgehog wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had to comply with local law in every area they operate it would be extremely complicated and expensive to manage. I think they fear the precedent not the dollars in this specific case. Edit: To be clear my opinion is that FB should be forced to comply, by federal action if necessary. That their business depends on not taking responsibility for the messages they choose to amplify is their problem and they sho…

> If they had to comply with local law in every area they operate ...then they would be on a level playing field with everybody else. The alternative ("we don't care for some of these laws in some places we operate, so we decline to follow them") is what is generally referred to as a criminal enterprise.

This a hundred times. Just because you're big doesn't mean you get to choose what laws or rules you follow. If it doesn't scale without rule breaking then, well, it doesn't scale. They have enormous resources yet bitch and moan that they'd have to spend some of them to follow the rules. Pff, I'd make a shit ton more money if I didn't pay my taxes or cheat people. How would that work out for me?

If a 1000 (or 10k, or whatever) businesses in aggregate have a similar market cap and revenue to them while also following the rules then I fail to see how a single company has a problem with that. If it does then maybe splitting it up will make things easier...

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#34

Post by hedgehog »

_jal wrote: post #9
hedgehog wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they had to comply with local law in every area they operate it would be extremely complicated and expensive to manage. I think they fear the precedent not the dollars in this specific case. Edit: To be clear my opinion is that FB should be forced to comply, by federal action if necessary. That their business depends on not taking responsibility for the messages they choose to amplify is their problem and they sho…

"Compliance is hard" is not an excuse accepted anywhere. But just in case you actually believe this should be convincing, consider how many tax jurisdictions Facebook does business in. Do you think they just ignore all those local rules?

I believe they should be forced to comply by whatever means we have and the liability should flow through to executives and senior employees.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#35

Post by plazmatic »

jaywalk wrote: post #2

This is about as blatant as it gets. They were sued in 2018, lost, and agreed to make changes. They changed nothing, got sued again in 2020, and have now lost again. They deserve the max penalty.

No post body was provided.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#36

Post by christkv »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #26
endisneigh wrote: post #8

How much money does meta even make from political ads? Why would they even want to deal with this?

I wonder if Meta ever ran its own political ads, without a specific candidate paying for them. That might be one reason to obscure the advertiser. (I mean, they _definitely_ did this with generic "get out and vote" advertising, but of course that's not overtly favoring one candidate or the other.)

Depends if it’s geographically targeted to favor your choice political candidate. Say only run get out the vote for people that are likely to vote for candidate A over B

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#37

Post by worldsayshi »

endisneigh wrote: post #8

How much money does meta even make from political ads? Why would they even want to deal with this?

It once again makes me wonder what they want to do with all that money. Meta is one of the most powerful companies. They get all this money to sell some of that money.

What really is the end game here? The whole point of money or power would be to use it to do something you care about? What use is money and power for the sake of itself? Why have it if all you want is more of it?

At least some rich people seem to want to do something with their riches and power. Which makes the rest of them even more of an enigma.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#38

Post by mszcz »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24
numair wrote: post #15

Quoted post unavailable.

You're making two relatively-unrelated claims. One, that Facebook--a wildly profitable publicly-traded company--is run as a political machine. Two, that its employees bear moral culpability. The first claim is extraordinary. Is Facebook's leadership powerful? Of course. Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not. If anything, their government affairs unit is laughably incapable of keeping its client from…

> If anything, their government affairs unit is laughably incapable of keeping its client from being a perennial political punching bag.

To be honest I'm pretty sure they are perfectly ok being a political punching bag as long as that's where it ends and no-one does anything substantial to them... Sadly, I don't recall them really getting their teeth kicked in for anything they did wrong.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#39

Post by bogwog »

munk-a wrote: post #12
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares? The AG identified 782 violations and requested treble damages [1]. That's $23mm right there, not including the state's legal costs (which are also trebled). [1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMSJ.PDF

To actually impact Facebook and spur positive change they'll need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps this is out of the domain of what courts can reasonably enforce and we need the legislature to take action.

If a single executive goes to prison for something like this, even just for a few months, it will drastically reduce the willingness to break the law from these companies no matter how huge they are.

Re: Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

#40

Post by nickff »

numair wrote: post #15

Quoted post unavailable.

You say you know Facebook ”… a lot better than 99% of those who will comment…”, could you be a little more specific as to how/what you know? Are you talking about being personally acquainted with executives, privy to internal communications, or familiar with the code base?
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