Facebook parent Meta fined $24.6M for violating Washington state's political ad disclosure law:
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, was fined the maximum penalty of $24.6 million on Wednesday for violating Washington state's campaign finance transparency law.
King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North found that Meta intentionally violated Washington law 822 times. Each fine carried a penalty of $30,000. Attorney General Bob Ferguson's office called the judgement "the largest campaign finance penalty anywhere in the country — ever."
"I have one word for Facebook's conduct in this case — arrogance," Ferguson said in a news release. "It intentionally disregarded Washington's election transparency laws. But that wasn't enough. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be declared unconstitutional. That's breathtaking.
"Where's the corporate responsibility?" Ferguson continued. "I urge Facebook to come to its senses, accept responsibility, apologize for its conduct, and comply with the law. If Facebook refuses to do this, we will beat them again in court."
[...] According to the attorney general, the law requires campaign advertisers, including entities such as Meta that host political ads, to make information about Washington political ads that run on their platforms available for public inspection in a timely manner. The state asserted that Meta violated the law repeatedly since December 2018 and committed hundreds of violations.
In court filings, Meta called Washington state "an outlier," arguing that the disclosure law violates the First Amendment by unfairly targeting political speech, and imposing onerous timelines for disclosing what Meta considers unreasonable degrees of detail to people who request information about political ads.
A judge rejected that argument in September and granted Washington's motion for summary judgment, resolving the case without trial.
(Score: -1, Troll) by HammeredGlass on Friday October 28 2022, @11:16PM
can't let these people (who Just Won'T DIE?!) do any more voting as they get older and more resistant to the insanities being propagated across the airwaves uncontested by moderate minds
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2022, @12:20AM (4 children)
And they'll receive another firmly worded letter
What was the "fine"? about a hundredth of a penny?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Saturday October 29 2022, @01:14AM (2 children)
If there were laws and court decisions like this in every state, the total fines would exceed a billion dollars. That's a lot of money, but according to yahoo finance Meta's profits are about 39 billion annually.
Politics is literally life-or-death action, and people who deliberately subvert political truth-in-advertising should face jail time. The problem is that criminal laws about politics are already being badly abused, with the party in power determining who gets indicted.
The fundamental problem with big government is that it attracts evil people and corrupts almost everyone.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Saturday October 29 2022, @01:46AM
Dollars are the only thing they understand, and the only thing they really fear is is a long term loss of dollars. They need to significantly up the penalties on transgressors, up to and including knocking them and their families down to living on minimum wage levels for however many years deemed necessary.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by khallow on Saturday October 29 2022, @03:45AM
I'd start with the people proposing and passing such laws. The abuse and hypocrisy is baked into the scheme. And AG Ferguson, whining about the "breaktaking" nature of Meta/Facebook's defense on constitutional grounds, clearly chooses to ignore the history of such laws which have in turn been routinely breathtaking in their unconstitutionality.
Here, there really is a valid argument. How does Facebook find this stuff? Sure, if someone pays for an ad explicitly to Washington state viewers, and Facebook can figure out it is political, then you have a start. But it misses the obvious, that organizations engaged in disinformation routinely get past such legal filters and routinely lie and deceive about what they're doing. For example, if my slimy group sends political, targeted Facebook ads as Facebook posts to small groups of people who may or may not be in Washington state, how do you even detect that, much less determine that it falls under the law?
And ultimately, these sorts of laws are harmful to public discourse. Not just because of the selective enforcement, but because it's not that hard to come up with a scheme that simply can't be punished. For example, the alleged Russian disinformation would already bypass any US law on the matter because they don't operate from the US and hence, aren't illegal where they're operating from.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Saturday October 29 2022, @01:25AM
They beat them that easily and got twenty-five million. I would think that Fecebook can do it at most once more before someone in the .wa.gov realises that a law with escalating penalties would be awesome.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 29 2022, @12:29AM
Where't the summary execution?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.