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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

#91

Post by pevey »

whimsicalism wrote: post #85
pevey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

This is but one example of one PAC for one party. I don’t know how many PACs exist, but easily hundreds. Thousands? A lot of money is donated to campaigns and PACs across local, state, and national elections, and a lot of that money is spent on advertising of some form, and a lot of that (as the article describes) has been shifted to digital. I would call it a lot a lot.

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

#92

Post by avg_dev »

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

You have put a smile on my face today.

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

#93

Post by ballenf »

bushbaba wrote: post #84
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.

Surely a cutoff in impression #s for hand review would be feasible? Even if the cutoff started absurdly high as logistics were ironed out. And then no cutoff for certain classes of ads, like political.

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

#95

Post by wmeredith »

MichaelCollins wrote: post #67
TechBro8615 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Pointing out a decade long track record of being right is a strange way of trying to discredit somebody.

Bahaha. This is an excellent take.

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

#97

Post by loeg »

adamsb6 wrote: post #42

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Facebook's solution to the Washington law was to no longer run political ads in Washington. Testing this out right now, from my home in Washington, if I try to create an ad and mark it as political, I'm told I need to get authorized to be able to run such an ad.

It seems like FB failed to successfully prevent people running political ads in Washington, because on encountering the roadblock you identified, the ad customers just unchecked the "this is a political ad" checkbox.

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

#98

Post by throwawaypppu »

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 got done on not publishing data that, from my quick skim, would not come from human review. e.g. targeting data etc.

I can only assume Meta feels the risk/costs of fines are less than the bennefit of not disclosing who pays them big dollars for targeting certain demographics. I.e not provide ammunition for law makers to come after them in more costly area.

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

#99

Post by gloryjulio »

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.

I am curious about how other similar platforms handle this problem (like youtube) handles this kind of problems. If someone could provide some insight it would be great

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

#100

Post by whimsicalism »

lozenge wrote: post #86
whimsicalism wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but they are definitely not correct (worked in campaign finance tech for a bit).
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