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Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign finance laws

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141–150 of 156 posts

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

#141
post #72
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps a Walter White quote is fitting here: "I'm in the empire business."

That's likely as accurate as one could be here.

It makes sense that people that want 'power for sake of power' wins the power game. Everyone else are optimizing for something else.

I just don't believe such person exist. Everyone wants something.

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

#142

Maybe time to rethink the way fines are determined. I’d be very much in favour of the “swiss model” for traffic fines - based on your income. You did X wrong, here’s the set price from our catalogue vs. you did X wrong and based on your earnings, here’s what you owe.

Right? Does that article say $238k is what they have to pay? That’s nothing to Meta. Where’s the incentive to not do it again?

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

#143
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…

> Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not.

Banning the former President, having affiliations with political agencies, getting people to change political opinions with targeted advertising, experimenting brain control through algorithms... Are you sure?

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

#144
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg spent enough money to give every US citizen $1000000 on his last presidential run! (Not really… there were just some newscasters that were really bad at math) But he did spend like $1B as just one candidate in the primaries.

We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs etc. The spending is so wasteful. If they care so much about the problems they're campaigning on, they could use the money to work on fixing them.

I was thinking you were going on a different direction. Like an amendment requiring newscasters to have at least a 700 on the SAT Math.

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

#145
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of the post am I not addressing? It's basically all generic bombast and invective. You can't really post generic bombast and invective on HN, even if some people like your generic bombast and invective because it's generic bombast and invective. I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know about a forum we've both been on for about 83771 million years.

Arguing that FB's primary reason for being is as a political influence operation rather than providing network effects to its users. I don't agree with your characterization of the comment. No doubt our interpretations will continue to differ.

My characterization of the comment is entirely orthogonal to any underlying truth it may be referring to - it's a trash comment. Yelling 'you're fat!' at an overweight person is a trash comment even if you somehow happen to believe it's also public health advocacy.

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

#146
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly lately, and flamewars are what we're trying to avoid here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dang, you are awesome, and I appreciate your efforts at keeping 4chan and Reddit away... but IMHO his comment is not really flaming, especially as it wasn't a combative response. [A quick look at his other comments implies he is not a troll, though a bit pessimistic.]

If I look closely at it, the GP comment seems completely unsubstantive. Unsubstantive + generic + indignant = flamewar.

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

#147
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.

You: "If they complied with the law, then they wouldn't be profitable."

It seems your conclusion is, "Therefore they should be above the law."

No, that isn't how it works. They *must* comply with the law, and if they cannot be profitable when they are not a criminal entity, then they should go out of business.

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

#148
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs etc. The spending is so wasteful. If they care so much about the problems they're campaigning on, they could use the money to work on fixing them.

I was thinking you were going on a different direction. Like an amendment requiring newscasters to have at least a 700 on the SAT Math.

My hope would be that we have an intelligent society that can easily see through the mistakes. There are so many mistakes and half truths on the news that it's almost not worth following. I view everything they say with some level of skepticism.

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

#149
post #120
post #6

This company really is a complete and utter dumpster fire.

Honestly I'm surprised how can they still find enough morally bankrupt people to work for them. The pay might be good, but it's not like anyone working there couldn't find a similarly well paid job at a similar company.

I've set up an automatic reply email to Facebook recruiters telling them in detail why I'm not interested in doing "the most meaningful work of my career" for them.

Although, come to think, I haven't heard from them in a while.

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

#150
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could see $20 million a month, but billion doesn't work here since the Romney campaign didn't spend even one billion[0]. Is this one of those weird "billion means something different in my country" things? Because even then, the miscommunication is usually between billion (10^9 in most English) and trillion (10^12), in short scale[1]. [0]: https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/P80003353/?tab=summary [1]: https://en.wi…

No, pretty sure "million" means 10^6 everywhere.
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