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
If ignoring the law costs only $23mm every two-year election cycle, Facebook probably figures that ignoring the law is worthwhile.
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
There is a world of difference between "posting flamewar comments" and pointing out the problems associated with Facebook's massive political influence campaigning.
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?
Additionally the judge should bar Facebook from displaying political ads. That would be far more punishment (and better for society I think) than a mere few hundred million fine.
I would be surprised if they come up with much more than "Search the couch cushions" money from Meta, and, if they do, the Devil will be wearing ear muffs, before they see any of it.
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.
Yeah, I completely agree. I wasn't trying to imply that I condone their behavior.
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.
Facebook can arbitrarily decide what millions of people will see. And no reason not to use it whenever convenient.
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
They are all the same way, maybe even worse. Google is notoriously allergic to having real people in any step of a workflow, even for paying customers. Twitter is currently going through its own battle with the fact that a huge chunk of the userbase isn't even real. Amazon product quality is going down due to lack of manual quality checking of their sellers. And so on. The culprit is always the same: real people don't scale to the expectations of shareholders, so everything gets automated, and then some very real people show up and exploit the system.
If more people do what he’s doing (rally against evil corps) the world might be a better place
It's funny that so much ire is directed at tech companies when I think there are a number of other companies that could be critiqued for much worse behavior.
Here, at least, most of us are in the tech industry, so ire directed at tech companies is us collectively trying to get our house in order first.
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.