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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

#81

Post by whimsicalism »

colinmhayes wrote: post #31
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.

> it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.f

Probably because they were doing hyperspecific targeting, not because FB literally didn't have any more users to serve ads.

I doubt political ads are a major part of the mix - for one, there is little evidence that they are all that effective compared to TV ads.

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

#82

Post by ska »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #10
colechristensen wrote: post #3

With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares? They say Meta did hundreds of them... so a few million dollars. What's that, two engineer years?

> 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

Setting fines like this can always have an incentive problem (see also extraction companies with "oops, I shouldn't have mined/cute/whatever there").

I've always wondered if a sensible structure could be made to ensure that the fine is at minimum a few multiples of the possible benefit to the company. With advertising this is harder than say, falling trees.

e.g. we estimate your company generate revenues of X from this activity, so we set the fine at 10X. If you disagree with X, you can prove it with detailed, audited statements, and we will take 10 times that amount if we are convinced.

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

#83

Post by AnimalMuppet »

giantg2 wrote: post #60
TremendousJudge wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to argue that, because otherwise it would eat into their bottom line to the point of unprofitability. You can't run a service for billions of people with less than 100k employees that also has an editor review everything.

If it's unable to comply with the law and stay profitable, then maybe they should go out of business.

Or change their business model.

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

#84

Post by bushbaba »

bombcar wrote: post #18

From that PR it seems partial compliance is what got them burned. They obviously knew what ads were political because they put some information about them up, but not all. If they had simply not complied at all and tried to blame their customers for not classifying the ads correctly, it might have gone a bit better in their favor. Related, it's still insane that companies can basically argue "this ad that thousands u…

Because it is too hard while still letting the SMB market access to the platform.

Requiring a human to review each ad increases the fixed cost of serving a campaign.

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

#85

Post by whimsicalism »

pevey wrote: post #22
endisneigh wrote: post #8

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

The short answer is, a lot of money. Like, a lot a lot. See a recent article from the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/us/politics/senate-republ...

The low tens of millions on digital ads across all senate campaigns. That is definitely not a lot a lot.

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

#86

Post by lozenge »

whimsicalism wrote: post #81
colinmhayes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.f Probably because they were doing hyperspecific targeting, not because FB literally didn't have any more users to serve ads. I doubt political ads are a major part of the mix - for one, there is little evidence that they are all that effective compared to TV ads.

We are talking about a campaign spending almost $20 billion a month, admittedly Facebook ads would only be a part of that, but why is it unrealistic that they ran out of ad spots to buy?

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

#87

Post by lozenge »

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.)

Zuckerberg has so much money, it would be cheaper and less risky to just pay somebody to pay somebody to pay somebody to fund a PAC with offshore accounts with hidden ownership.

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

#88

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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.

What, in your view, is "the max penalty" for this situation?

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

#89

Post by ThePadawan »

giantg2 wrote: post #60
TremendousJudge wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need to argue that, because otherwise it would eat into their bottom line to the point of unprofitability. You can't run a service for billions of people with less than 100k employees that also has an editor review everything.

If it's unable to comply with the law and stay profitable, then maybe they should go out of business.

Fully agree! See also "loud pipes save lives".

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

#90

Post by sixothree »

TremendousJudge wrote: post #48
bombcar wrote: post #18

From that PR it seems partial compliance is what got them burned. They obviously knew what ads were political because they put some information about them up, but not all. If they had simply not complied at all and tried to blame their customers for not classifying the ads correctly, it might have gone a bit better in their favor. Related, it's still insane that companies can basically argue "this ad that thousands u…

They need to argue that, because otherwise it would eat into their bottom line to the point of unprofitability. You can't run a service for billions of people with less than 100k employees that also has an editor review everything.

If they can afford to buy personal information about its users, they can afford basic compliance.
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