Meta fined record-breaking $24.6m for deliberately ignoring political ad law Despite warnings of Chinese and Russian mischief and manipulation ahead of the US midterm elections, it seems American companies and citizens are perfectly capable of denting democracy on their own. A Washington judge fined Meta $24.6 million this week after ruling that Facebook intentionally broke [PDF] the state's campaign …
contain more than a rounding error in fines, years after the fact, nothing will change. Injunctive relive or backsides promptly in jail cells will result in lasting change.
Delayed negligible fines will result in a doubling of efforts on the part of companies like Facebook and Google(and yes calling them by their real names, the alpha/meta crap is all for show).
The magnitude of available penalties is a problem with very deep pocketed companies.
Perhaps instead of an absolute maximum have something like "$25m or 2.5% of global turnover, whichever is greater".
While it would seem fairer to make it a "% of profit" these companies are so good at hiding profits (to avoid tax) it would be pointless.
Even better: a corporate death penalty, the whole company is shut down and loses all its money. Prevent it from meta-stasizing even more and causing further damage to society.
Haha, how fitting, the word Metastasizing has both the words "meta" and "stasi" in it... Well "stasi" is precisely what Meta does, compiling enormous dossiers on 99% of the whole population, to sell ads. And also to sell to government organisations, such as law enforcement and the military, probably by the back door.
For all that this, like the others penalties, is a derisory fine, I think the cumulative effect is beginning to weigh on Facebook significantly now.
Their drop in profits wasn't trivial and it wasn't all down to the Metaverse misstep.
(Perhaps it should be called called one small misstep for a Zuck, one giant misleap for Zuck-kind.)
the more a nation bullies it#s citizens into right wingery, the less effective they are as a world power. Look at the UKs decline and fall and learn.
It's the same for left wingery too. For the same reasons. Gravity is gravity whatever you call it and wherever you are. Renaming it a commie plot doesn't change reality.
One think that Zuck did right was name his company "Meta". What an apt name for a company that is literally a cancer that spreads throughout the whole of society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastasis
Absolutely it is a pathogen, that infects our social relationships, forcing us to use it, or lose out. And the resource it extracts from us, in order to thrive, is our time and attention. Therefore feeding the pathogen's database by providing information that can be used for behavioural ad targeting. Thus attracting advertisers to the platform and supplying it with money. Which it then can use to further entrench itself in our lives. Quite a complex life cycle there, too.
It's just a name fit for a dystopian sci-fi novel, where this giant corporation called Meta is hoovering up every scrap of personal information on us, building dossiers that rival that of East Germany. And through data-mining this corporation knows us better than we know ourselves... And police and intelligence agencies are trawling through it all as part of their routine day-to-day operations, looking for "wrongthink". And we are all surveilling each other for our "safety" and to stop "crimespeech"....
Oops, wait, this is actually real and is going on, and it's not fiction and neither is it a conspiracy theory.... And I look at the clock on my computer and the year is "2022".... Well then that explains everything.
Until laws prescribe criminal penalties for violating them, why would any company obey the law if the cost for disobedience (usually some kind of non-prosecution non-admission of liability agreement) is less than the profit gained by breaking it? I'd break the law, if you told me you'd give me a hundred million dollars but I'd have to then pay ten million of that to someone else.
Washington is only one state, and far from the biggest of them. What do you think was Facebook's profit from that advertising?
Some relevant figures: Washington has 4.8 million registered voters, so the fine amounts to a shade over $5 per voter. And it's not a battleground state - neither party devotes much special attention to it at a national level.
If every other state levied a proportionally similar fine, the total would be over $1 billion. And let's not forget the 50% surcharge in legal fees.
Washington is doing its bit. If the other 49 states would just step up and follow suit...
Meta is already $700 billion down.
Zuckerberg keeps taking the company in unprofitable directions, and despite being the major shareholder, still has a legal duty NOT to destroy other shareholders holdings along the way.
Can bet they're gonna sue for lost value due to deliberate malfeasance.
People who cannot think for themselves should be banned from voting to solve this problem.
No, seriously. The people who are so easily led that they make voting decisions solely based upon pop-up advertising garbage are not qualified to contribute to the election outcome. Eliminate them and this type of election advertising will cease to exist.
Yup, a totally untenable and controversial statement. But it would solve this issue around political advertising.
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