Sure, but where's the jail time for executives. This may be a bit more than the usual slap on the wrist, but its hardly consequence that actually matters to the likes of Meta. This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible for the crimes they sign off on.
"But my boss told me to increase engagement at all costs, including substantially increased rates of teen suicides, so shrug guess I have to since my visa will be revoked otherwise and I need this cash to send home to my family."
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
I will never understand the framing of visa-sponsored workers at Facebook as indentured servants. These are incredibly highly-paid jobs, easily in the top 5% of earners in the United States even for fairly junior roles. Even in California, these folks are in the top quintile of earners. These are people who could earn a third as much in India, Canada, or the Netherlands, and still be living exceptionally well. They have exercised more agency than the vast majority of Americans or even Bay Area residents.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
All of the accolades you bestowed upon visa-sponsored workers could be true. But the framing of indentured servitude comes from the visa sponsorship itself. These workers do not feel they have the right to free expression or to speak out against unethical business practices (not just data privacy but even 9/9/6 work schedules), for fear of losing their sponsorship. That’s why “indentured” is used: they’re contracted to a specific employer. They don’t have freedom of movement in the labor market. This also creates labor price arbitrage, which employers use to pay visa workers less than permanent residents and citizens. This labor arbitrage inevitably lowers the wages of non-sponsored workers.
This is more or less an uninformed vibes-based response.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
It's disgusting and a downplay of atrocity of slavery. It's why we should stop allowing tech companies to import so many foreign workers if this is what they are okay with: openly destroying our society for money.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.
Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse. Now that machines participate in giving instructions it seems quite logical.
If the wires are hanging out of the wall and someone asks me to switch the power on it reminds me how my old boss almost died then chased the guy with a hammer but collapsed from his injuries before he could kill him. So i disassemble the switchboard. If there is someone like that walking around I don't care how long it takes. Sometimes they get angry I just ignore it. They may also report it to my boss.
> Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse
This is sophistry that was used to condemn Nazis but has never applied to any context outside of the Nuremberg trials. Fail to follow orders and you're shot as a traitor. Follow them and you're hanged as a war criminal. "Just follow orders" is the basis of paid employment itself.
It is assumed that those giving bad orders will be held responsible for doing so, but this rarely proves to be the case. See the eBay harassment of the Steiners. Everybody involved that followed orders was punished except the executive that signed off on and provided support for the operation.
But in the Equifax breach, two executives were fired following criminal intrusion by Chinese hackers they had no involvement with. Everyone that neglected to follow orders to patch Struts probably still works there.
Perhaps so. That liability means doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. need to push back because now their skin is truly in the game.
But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.
> But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
From the judgement: “The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act […].”
Emphasis mine.
It isn’t criminal law, but maybe at that level it should be.
I am, in fact, fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times. I am very equal opportunity punishment for all serial lying criminals. What part of what you said was supposed to be undesirable?
> fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
Beating someone with a stick isn't the only way to cause harm. And if you cause harm to 40 million people, you should be held accountable - it should be treated as a crime.
In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear to everyone by now: this is how Facebook operates. The people who do this stuff get promoted, and vice versa. This will keep happening until those people are scared straight, and the incentive structure that turns people into this are abolished.
Honestly it doesn’t matter what they get them on, half of the PMC in America needs to be indicted on RICO charges for white collar crimes against humanity
So our obsession with jail is nuts, because... you lean towards no one willfully signed off on a lie, in a company with a history like Meta/Facebook, in a $25B fine?
Full presidential pardons go for just a couple of million, a rounding error on that fine. Invoking social media and complaining about a democrat judge or deep state conspiracy and forking over the money using the right attorneys is all it takes. Nobody with that kind of resources will go to jail.
I'm sure the crime reached into all 50 states. Maybe they should be tried and sentenced in all of them, so avoiding jail would need 51 pardons instead of just one.
Just this week the New York Times reported the case of a venezolan banker who received a pardon after hiring a former lawyer of the president. There probably will be litigation if they misreport it so this does not seem hearsay to me.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
The CEO is the only one with decision power and is responsible for all crimes. The CEO is also the one making the most money off the crimes. If we don't actual jail them, crimes will keep increasing as we are witnessing. AI companies are now bragging about their crimes publicly.
Good is arresting a CEO and holding them in prison for a few decades. These fines do nothing. These fines are the enemy of good.
If corporations are people, then they should face the exact same punishment as a person. If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff.
> If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff
…what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
How is the circle of passing draconian laws instead of proportional response then driving draconian regimes to abuse that permit not a lesson we can learn?
>what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
the jury's ruling?
- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury
- the duration and repetition of the conduct
- the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred
- the involvement of senior Facebook leadership
- the size of New Mexico audiences reached
- clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements
That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.
You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.
>How is the circle of passing draconian laws
Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.
A sole proprietor would also only face financial damages, not jail time. Employees can be charged with criminal charges. Corporations don't protect from that.
The problem with fines is that they don't actually disincentivize bad behavior by companies, as long as they are large enough to absorb the fine as a cost of doing business.
Sorry but it sounds like you think "limited liability" should only be understood to refer to corporate debts and bankruptcy proceedings and that "corporate personhood" should be understood as a legal fiction to make things simpler for bureaucrats.
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
The fines are not big enough if the companies can just absorb the blow like that. $25B is not large enough to be a problem for Facebook. Add two more digits and the executives would be running to their doomsday bunkers.
If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now. There might be an obsession, but it's only about jailing peons.
> If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now
This is the opposite of what happens in any incarceration-happy culture. See: the French Revolution. The rich got away, got richer, in fact. The machines of terror inevitable turned on the poor. Liberties are most valuable to those of us who are not billionaires.
Sure, but we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get.
If I do something to fuck over this many people and harm society this much I’m going to jail. No billionaire is having the same consequences.
Until that changes you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution in a gamble to maybe give consequences to those in charge. Hell that’s more than half the reason we got Trump.
Also I’m going to call out your analysis of the French Revolution as failing entirely as poor. Some of the rich got richer but people wanted the kings head and they definitely got it.
> we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get
Sure. Light a bonfire. Scream and windmills. And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
> you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution
The rich got richer in the French Revolution! America’s rich want that.
> And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
If you’re already in the blast radius of the current system, why would you care if it expands if you think it might include the people fucking you over in the first place?
I’m not disagreeing that there are problems that could result from this idea. I’m disagreeing with you on the idea that people are crazy for wanting this while there’s this class of people who do whatever they want whenever they want to the rest of us.
Like I pointed out with the French king loosing his head during the French Revolution. The fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered.
They are already beyond consequence generally, more power for them doesn’t change the relationship between the common man and the nobles.
You saw the same emotional situation play out with Luigi Mangiones actions despite having scant effect on the system.
I don't think "holding rich people to the same standard as the peasants" is equivalent to "lowering the bar for criminality"
In fact, I'd go so far as saying it's much closer to "keep the bar for criminality where it is, but apply it to everyone equally" but personally I'd add a little addendum about scaling up the punishment for crimes by those with greater influence and responsibilities to the people, but that's just me
China jails executives, they just sentenced the CEO of evergrande to life, with a death penalty suspended sentence.
They do this despite jailing fewer people in total (not just per-capita) than America.
One could say that this is because Xi is untouchable but I think it's more about the social norms. Americans can't even consider a world where we prosecute the powerful.
Our system consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I would agree except jail time is what all us peons face for all sorts of far more benign charges. So until poor people's punishments are lessened they are going to advocate for greater punishment for these crimes.
The whole purpose of companies is that the bankruptcy of a company will not ruin entrepreneurs and strip them of all their belongings. You have the possibility of failing softly. That's a good thing because it enables you to take a calculated risk. But that risk is usually just money.
When a company, for example its managers through willful negligence or an outright lie, enables the organization to do something that is considered illegal, they absolutely should be held personally responsible. The existence of a company as an entity shields the entrepreneurship itself, not individuals who are actively harming others.
Managers who willingly poisoned people with cigarettes or lead, and now with brain rot, while simultaneously claiming that it is not harmful to the public, even when they know that is simply a lie, should absolutely be held responsible.
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders in 2026 should start pushing for an investment markets reform to introduce criminal responsibility for such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the executives not act against their fiduciary duty and the shareholders' bottom line.
We rarely imprison the people who actually deserve it. Even when we do, it's barely a punishment if the person is wealthy.
Our jails are full, but a lot of that is we harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves. And that's mostly because the grift of for-profit prisons.
Our jails are full, relative to other developed countries, because we have vastly higher rates of crime. Our laws, by design, hamper the ability of the state to "harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves". Talk to any cop in any metro area of note; everyone knows who the criminals are by name and face, but they remain largely out there to offend and reoffend because it's hard (again, by design) to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.
It's widely known that drug offenses are easier ways to stick criminals (who perpetrate crimes other than drug offenses) in prison, analogous to how in the end they convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. There is no epidemic of mere consumers of controlled substances going to prison, at least not in the past decade or longer.
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
Except that proving it is rarely necessary because the system relies on plea deals and because the 6th amendment is not automatically enforced. There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial.
Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative (and which winds up encouraging recidivism and compounding the problem further). Things have improved over the past 20 years but we have not done enough to address the problem.
> There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
I am not sure what "relative to the homicide rate" is supposed to prove. The homicide rate is not the same as the homicide conviction rate, or put another way, perhaps we have a lower incarceration rate relative to our homicide rate compared to other countries because we are solving a smaller fraction of homicides compared to those countries.
(Also possible, but I suspect less likely, is that our homicide rate is higher but not in proportion to the number of murderers; maybe we have a bigger problem with serial killers than other countries, and thus have fewer murderers to incarcerate relative to the homicide rate.)
I'm in complete agreement about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Complaining about this outcome serves very little purpose.
But this case was about selling out democracy. I suppose it falls into the category of great crimes like killing people with cigarettes and deceiving the public and regulators while doing it. If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way.
The American attitude about and system of incarceration is pretty crazy, but so is our idea of scale in crime. At the retail end of our criminal so-called justice system, you have cops that in many places fragrantly engage in overtime and detail fraud, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting minor criminals in prison and penury. It's all pretty crazy.
> If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way
This crosses jurisdictions. We have no international legal system that doesn’t rely on voluntary cooperation.
If you’re claiming that every car- and bicycle-theft victim is a billionaire, idk what to tell you.
Oh bike thieves are lower than dog poop, for sure. My ambivalence stems from the cop who might catch that thief stealing 100X more from the municipality in the form of overtime fraud. The rot is in play at every level of scale.
Also you don't need international justice to find criminality in how DOGE was done.
Sure but also there has to be some sort of deterrent and an executive who's worth is $100M+ who can't touch their $100M because their in jail is far more of a deterrent than META missing its earnings for a quarter because they owe the government a one-time slap on the wrist.
I'm all ears on what a different penalty could be that ultimately stops this behavior.
PS - META's stock is currently up 2% in after hours trading, so
Yes, our obsession with jail is nuts. Why do I only hear people say so in response to populist calls to throw corporate executives in prison for actual crimes?
I assume it's the typical "accepting responsibility" of execs and politicians where nothing happens. Best case they throw some underling under the bus or have their institution pay a fine. But they themselves have no consequences
The judgement here was for violation of civil law, not criminal law. If New Mexico would have gone after the executives, the result would have been a much smaller fine, not jail. Or are you suggesting the executives should have been prosecuted for some criminal law violation? If so, what?
The literal point of incorporation is that you as a shareholder or proprietor of a business are legally separated from the corporation in the eyes of the law.
We need reforms on corporate governance. Right now Meta is basically Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of bag holders. They can't vote him out because he has both a board seat and majority voting power all on his own. Dumping the stock is far from a safe thing for institutional investors to do if they want to avoid lawsuits or regulatory attention.
It needs to be illegal for you to both be the CEO of a publicly-traded company and the voting majority shareholder. Note I say majority, not major plurality.
There is no law or regulation which requires institutional investors to hold Meta stock. Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement, and investment managers have significant flexibility unless there's something more specific in their own organizational bylaws. They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
> Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement
The requirement is what a lawyer can convince a dozen jurors the requirement should be. If there's a lawsuit against a fund manager at an institutional investor saying "you didn't fulfill your duty as a fiduciary because x", there's at least some risk that x becomes a real responsibility for fiduciaries through the outcome of that case. If the zeitgeist dictates that as a responsibility, it is a responsibility.
> They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
The fact that they aren't doing so when the company is losing billions of dollars in legal judgments would suggest either
1) They can't do so because they would lose money doing so
or
2) Our system is in need of reform so that when executives direct a company in such a way that it is routinely facing legal exposure, shareholders remove those executives so that corporations act as better citizens and things are handled at the shareholder meeting level instead of the court system level.
And there it is, another ignorant HN user making an uninformed claim about legal issues they don't understand with no actual case law citations to back it up.
It's a jury system. If they manage to get a dozen people through voir dire that dislike the state of the social media market enough, they can, in theory, find Meta liable. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change. We really need to reassess this perverse concept of a corporation where you can simply commit crimes against people, personally profit, yet never be personally held responsible, let alone accountable.
The same thing is causing problems in the financial markets right now, with massive zombie company portfolios of various private equity firms still paying out fees to the managers to siphon off the debt and assets of investors.
> As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change.
AI simply makes it easier for corporations to commit crimes with impunity, now they can distance themselves from responsibility even further. No one has even bothered to levy fines for AI agents hacking or corporations violating copyright to train their models.
Corporations shield shareholders from civil liability not operators from criminal charges. You seem to have no concept at all what a corporate shield is or the difference between criminal and civil law
It's a problem with the law too, but corporations still effectively shield individuals from criminal prosecution for things individuals would be prosecuted for by breaking up accountability among many different people/groups of people.
If they get more decisions like this and they're overextended with AI investment, they'll be pretty fucked. Of course, the cockroaches will scuttle away without penalty.
It's a very good point. The further upon appeal Meta goes, the more removed they get from a jury and they'll be more likely to get a favorable ruling due to the company's negative approval rating amongst the public
A jury is involved in the process. If the jury doesn't find violations, the judge can't assign penalties for those violations.
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
It's $11,737 per current resident of New Mexico by my math. So, 20+ offenses per resident of the state? Of course, many people weren't even Facebook users, so it must be even more offenses per user.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
OK fine, it's about deterrence. Explain why are trying 100x more vigorously to deter the category 'advertising-based infractions' (which the majority of the 'victims' still don't even know happened, let alone experience any pain and suffering from) than 'negligently giving people cancer and killing them'?
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
You could sue Facebook for $25 trillion and a local jury would unanimously vote yes. These numbers don’t mean anything. This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney. You think they'd have trouble finding 12 jurors in Santa Fe, NM who dislike big tech? It is always shut down or massively reduced by a higher court.
That's not what happened here though. The penalties were defined by law, the jurors applied them. The judge already reduced most of the penalty. So... what about this case is outlandish?
All such "let's multiply one large number with another large number followed by a third large number to come up with hundreds of billions in penalities" calculations never hold up in appeals. Otherwise if the logic was sound and there were actually 43 million violations then why was it reduced from $219.5 billion to $25 billion in the first place? Like I said everyone is making up numbers, and the appeals court will make up another one.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
I don't know why the judge reduced the penalty as the article didn't state that. I don't really have anything to go on other than you saying everyone is just making up numbers. I don't find that argument convincing given my experience with the courts.
It already was. According to NM law, the sum of fines for the 43 million violations Facebook committed against New Mexico would have been $219B, but the judge was feeling kind that day.
No. $219B is the absolute maximum theoretical fine assessable at $5000/violation x 43 million counts. The $25B number is still ridiculous. Either the number of counts is too high (seems likely at 20x the population of NM) or the assessment per count is too high, but regardless, they need to arrive at a lower number.
The class action was private, not initiated by states.
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
Meta will surely appeal, and will likely get the fine reduced to like 10% of that. But for comparison, in the recent multistate settlement over social media addiction by 47 states for $17 billion, there was a provision in that settlement to get $459 million [1] in exchange for releasing Meta from any state claims related to Cambridge Analytica. So those 47 states got $459 million for what New Mexico will likely get a few billion for.
Meta already got it to ~10%, but is trying to get it to ~1%. During the trial, it was determined that the total fine based on all violations to be $219B
I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot. I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
Yes, I remember an article in the Guardian about this, around 2015-6
Facebook does this. People think 'privacy' as a complaint and perhaps think about advertising on FB but straight up, settings get reset (including posts suddenly becoming Public. or graph search.)
Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in it. In 2010 he said privacy was no longer a social norm. Not only does he himself not believe in it, but he can't keep it to himself. He knows 'better than you'. So, he outright changes it himself or instructs his engineers to do it
It's like with Free Basics in India. You could, theoretically, support it. Many didn't, it was a form of digital colonialism. But let's say you happened to think it was a good idea. It didn't matter either way: Facebook sent emails on users' behalf to TRAI
That's who Zuckerberg is. A sociopath, a criminal, someone who knows nothing but how to steal
> I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot.
Do you have any more details on that? Are you talking about searches within Facebook or outside of it?
I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
You're being sarcastic, right? Right? It's a 1.5 trillion dollar company [1], how would this amount even be relevant compared to the profits they made from their behavior.
Maybe the $25B isn't guaranteed and doesn't seriously harm them on its own, but if the legal landscape shifts enough to make fines of this scale more common than the usual dozens-to-hundreds of millions, then it starts to impact their bottom line.
When the appeals reach the Supreme Court, if the S.C. should rule against Meta, Zuck will probably remember "wait a minute, I wiped my ass with $25B this morning, I'll just pay the fine, who cares."
It is pretty small for a company like Facebook, take a look at their quarterly revenue and the various credit facilities and sources of financing they have available. They could shrug off a one-time $25B fine.
You need another one or two digits before you can say it is "not a small fine."
This is just for new mexico, a relatively small state in a single country facebook operates in. It's probably a solid decade worth of profit in that state. Because their privacy policy that no one reads wasn't clear enough.
It’s hilarious that one of the outcomes of Meta cozying up with the current administration to escape scrutiny at the Federal level has been 50+ state attorneys general prosecuting them instead.
The AG was in charge of the prosecution of the case but they wisely didn't handle it all by themselves. New Mexico was represented in court by DiCello Levitt LLP and McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Each probably stand to make billions if the award is upheld.
> “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said in the statement.
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
They beat revenue expectations, and earnings per share was ok, and they guided for even higher revenue next quarter above estimates ofc.
Somehow Meta is making money despite starting to loose DAUs now. So honestly I don't quite understand what's what, also most of the big income is from Ads and biggest Ads spenders are startups and companies heavily dependent on VCs and AI... So it's definitely somewhat circular, and Ads is the most recession affected business so a down turn in markets will cycle through it.
But ngl if all the earnings are this ok then hyperscalers stock might not crash this quarter, well then again I didn't think they would but a person could dream.
I am quite bullish on AI, but would prefer the fluff to get out of the way asap, otherwise don't want it to happen at a bad time, and too many people get caught pants down.
WeWork made their weird adjusted revenue number and everyone lost their minds. Facebook makes up KPI’s that fly in the face of decades of industry standard and we’re just supposed to accept it lol
If you're on IG, it's pretty obvious how they're getting more ad revenue. They're serving up more ads through stories/reels and the ads have become less conspicuous over time. e.g. you're watching a story and only a few seconds into the story does the ad overlay appear whereas before you can tell it's an ad from the beginning.
Escaping litigation with a fine is always a good outcome, no matter how large the penalty. Stock price will drop the day governments start regulating these companies or breaking them up.
I've always been fond of the idea of putting a corporation in "jail" where any presence they have is shuttered for the duration, bank accounts are frozen, and locations are to be uninhabited except by third party security.
They can hire lawyers to argue it out while they sit in limbo like the rest of us.
Imagine if Amazon ran afoul of the law and AWS was offline in corporate jail for a day? It'd be motication to never, ever risk that happening.
Well Meta is reacting to all the costs by just starting to charge for things previously free, like sharing links.
I suspect they are now entering the Earthlink/AOL phase where they squeeze every last dime out of the confused and abandoned senior citizens left on the platform until they die off.
I'm saying I don't think we'll see that. Yes, many people I know have left facebook but I think that's an artifact of me being in a bubble rather than it being a global trend.
I am more optimistic. People are addicted to targeted content, but local LLMs are already great at this. I have an agent that manages my local playlists and operates my own local spotify from a consumer GPU.
And youtube, same thing. I have not actually used youtube in years. Local software downloads video files from their servers, strips all the ads and sponsored content, and shows me the ones most interesting to me.
Once that is easy for everyone to do with software and weights-on-silicon embedded in next gen phones, the entire value prop of these networks starts to fall apart.
Between that and endless fines and negative movies coming out, I think they can be killed, or at least not a thing kids are allowed near anymore.
Respectfully, you're in a bubble and few people really give a shit. Installing an ad-blocker is a ridiculously trivial exercise today, and it's now built-in to several popular browsers, but still 2/3 of internet users are not using one -- about 4 billion people.
Also, how do you scrape videos from YouTube after you "kill it"? YouTube's value is not contained within their web frontend. YouTube is popular because of the network effect they've built by providing massive amounts of free hosting for expensive-to-host content. An LLM does absolutely nothing to undermine that. And, if it ever became a threat to their bottom line, they'd just force users to use a trusted client. They don't bother now because the number of people doing what you're doing rounds to zero.
People are not notifying this nearly enough, but Meta is still going up and at it in Brazil [1] during one of the most polarized elections I've ever seen during my time.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
Thanks for continuing to talk about this. It's ridiculous how much the US meddles in the elections of others and acts all :surprised-pikachu: when Russia sorta kinda meddles a bit in ONE election of their own.
The book Careless People paints a picture of Zuck & Co that should cause anyone to hesitate to touch any of their products. It's a shame so much of the world runs on WhatsApp. It's a bigger shame that they were ever allowed to acquire WhatsApp in the first place.
Woah, I remember hearing about the Cambridge Analytica stuff for the first time in 2020 from watching "The Social Dilemma". I'm surprised there is still legal fall out from that. Also 15% interest until the fine is paid in full is wild. Wonder where they are going to get the cash given how much has been going to AI.
I’m fairly sure that most other states have already entered into an agreement preventing them from prosecuting about Cambridge analytica in exchange for a couple hundred million each (IANAL)
> Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the penalty, saying in a statement that the company is “confident” that it will “prevail on appeal.”
Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.
$0. for better or worse, they have ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. I don't think NM would/could expect to get any money from a penalty. I may misunderstand how penalties and bankruptcy work, but I would expect it's been a better use of time to try to get $$$ from Meta than a defunct entity.
> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Not necessarily the accounts or posts. They can be made to delete all the profiling data that they've collected over the years and be barred from inferring anything from user submitted past data and new data for a few years.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
> umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
>
> They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
There are much worse scandals internal to meta that get ignored because 8200.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
Yeah it is kind of sad how not stopping posts which fueled a literal genocide is hardly glanced at but Cambridge Analytica is considered a disaster of the highest order. Who died from Cambridge Analytica?
Honestly, this company is uninvestable if you have even a shred of morality.. but, even if you lack morality, you must see the writing on the wall re: their lingering risks.
Meta is the cigarette company of the modern era and if our historians are allowed to write a neutral take on this era, they will likely not be kind to meta.
25 bil is no where near enough for privacy damages, let alone what they'll have to deal with on the addiction damages down the road.
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others.
The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)
It’s crazy how these criminals can get away with it just by paying money. Sure, $25B isn’t peanuts, but this money shouldn’t have belonged to companies like Meta to begin with.
We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to. (ie. it's hyperbole, meaning "the US relies heavily on torts to enforce consumer privacy compared to other countries")
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
Who predicted it would be New Mexico defending the children of the US while seemingly every other state in the country is bought and paid for by pro surveillance capitalism lobbies?
Hopefully those corrupt politicians are paying attention to the NM model and realize they can get more money by beating all the cash out of Meta like a piñata and then regulate the entire industry like casinos and tobacco, with super high taxes and exclusive for really stupid consenting adults only.
I have no idea about judicial system in New Mexico, but it's a curious state - college is free effectively for everybody in the state, for example. Also school lunches are free. It's a rare combination of poor and blue.
I think Facebook is fine? It's where most neighborhood/city groups seem to be, and it works as expected for this. Marketplace is also pretty good, with less scams than other similar platforms.
A good start, yet still far from enough - as long as the punishments are not equal to their revenues generating by these illegal methods , big corporations will never stop exploiting society because to them those fines are just 'the cost of doing business'.
We need every state doing this, until it bankrupts them. Then the companies left will have true fear for the first time ever, and may be forced to reform or suffer the same fate.
So basically the state of New Mexico is taking $25B from Meta's market cap, therefore whomever invested in META; and where will this money go here?
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.
Sure, but where's the jail time for executives. This may be a bit more than the usual slap on the wrist, but its hardly consequence that actually matters to the likes of Meta. This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible for the crimes they sign off on.
No one will bother making a move on the execs until the get-out-of-jail-free cards they bought from the current president are no longer valid.
If only software engineers were liable like real engineers are
"But my boss told me to increase engagement at all costs, including substantially increased rates of teen suicides, so shrug guess I have to since my visa will be revoked otherwise and I need this cash to send home to my family."
Even when you cannot get highly employable US engineers to agree to do unethical work, you can always import some indentured servants who are too vulnerable to feel like they can say no.
I know someone that took a job at meta short term to get cash for a family member with cancer.
Go after the people giving the orders, not the workers trying to survive a deeply fucked up system.
I will never understand the framing of visa-sponsored workers at Facebook as indentured servants. These are incredibly highly-paid jobs, easily in the top 5% of earners in the United States even for fairly junior roles. Even in California, these folks are in the top quintile of earners. These are people who could earn a third as much in India, Canada, or the Netherlands, and still be living exceptionally well. They have exercised more agency than the vast majority of Americans or even Bay Area residents.
That said, expecting individual engineers to understand the greater context of building an online addiction machine is probably too much. The product managers and data scientists surface concerns and executives decide. And executives should be held criminally responsible in the event of gross negligence.
All of the accolades you bestowed upon visa-sponsored workers could be true. But the framing of indentured servitude comes from the visa sponsorship itself. These workers do not feel they have the right to free expression or to speak out against unethical business practices (not just data privacy but even 9/9/6 work schedules), for fear of losing their sponsorship. That’s why “indentured” is used: they’re contracted to a specific employer. They don’t have freedom of movement in the labor market. This also creates labor price arbitrage, which employers use to pay visa workers less than permanent residents and citizens. This labor arbitrage inevitably lowers the wages of non-sponsored workers.
This is more or less an uninformed vibes-based response.
1. Few workers report a 996 work schedule at Meta or other Mag7 companies. This work schedule is reported by smaller AI startups and Chinese and Indian tech firms.
2. H1B and many other sponsored visas are transferrable. I have had several colleagues get laid off or interview for other jobs and get hired elsewhere. The L visa is non-transferable, though it represents a minority of visa sponsorships in the US.
3. You directly ignored my data about workers at Meta out-earning other workers in the Bay Area. My foreign colleagues earned the same as I did at virtually every stage of my career.
In general macroeconomics, yes, the introduction of foreign workers results in wages getting pulled down. This "lump of labor" only has temporary impacts. The overall outcome is an increase in the market for engineers, as immigrants go on to found companies. NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company, is one of these.
It's disgusting and a downplay of atrocity of slavery. It's why we should stop allowing tech companies to import so many foreign workers if this is what they are okay with: openly destroying our society for money.
Expect the GOP to move in this direction as the democratic party starts going after big tech as well.
Why would you personally punish the chumps that execute the orders instead of leadership that gave the orders?
Why punish the leadership? they were just following their "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to maximize value.
Punish everyone, you may be unjust but at least you'll be thorough.
Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse. Now that machines participate in giving instructions it seems quite logical.
If the wires are hanging out of the wall and someone asks me to switch the power on it reminds me how my old boss almost died then chased the guy with a hammer but collapsed from his injuries before he could kill him. So i disassemble the switchboard. If there is someone like that walking around I don't care how long it takes. Sometimes they get angry I just ignore it. They may also report it to my boss.
RL is different like that but also quite similar.
> Im not a lawyer but i believe just following orders isnt considered a valid excuse
This is sophistry that was used to condemn Nazis but has never applied to any context outside of the Nuremberg trials. Fail to follow orders and you're shot as a traitor. Follow them and you're hanged as a war criminal. "Just follow orders" is the basis of paid employment itself.
It is assumed that those giving bad orders will be held responsible for doing so, but this rarely proves to be the case. See the eBay harassment of the Steiners. Everybody involved that followed orders was punished except the executive that signed off on and provided support for the operation.
But in the Equifax breach, two executives were fired following criminal intrusion by Chinese hackers they had no involvement with. Everyone that neglected to follow orders to patch Struts probably still works there.
The rules are arbitrary.
Ok sure, not in the eyes of the law. But ethically
It’s needs to be punishment all the way from the top to the bottom
that's how you build a case against the ring leader
"I was just following orders" has never been a valid excuse for anything, continue using it at your own peril.
"Real" engineers aren't responsible for their product being used in nefarious ways as long as the product was built according to the rules.
Perhaps so. That liability means doctors, engineers, lawyers, etc. need to push back because now their skin is truly in the game.
But a part of that process means introducing licensing to the field of software. Yet another hoop that this field has traditionally rejected. I don't think all SWE's "need" a license. But I do think that maybe it's long overdue to finally distinguish between a "programmer" and an "engineer" more formally.
> where's the jail time for executives
Our American obsession with jail is nuts. The violation at hand was “misleading state citizens about how it safeguards and collects user data.”
Lots of folks at Meta should be criminally investigated. But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible
Perfect is the enemy of the good.
> But not for this, not unless someone willfully signed off on a lie.
From the judgement: “The extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury, the duration and repetition of the conduct, the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred, the involvement of senior Facebook leadership, the size of New Mexico audiences reached, and the clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements established in the trial record support the highest level of penalty allowed by the New Mexico Unfair Practices Act […].”
Emphasis mine.
It isn’t criminal law, but maybe at that level it should be.
> the involvement of senior Facebook leadership
If anyone perjured themselves, granted. If not, criminalizing this lets anyone in power go after anything with any economic heft.
I am, in fact, fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times. I am very equal opportunity punishment for all serial lying criminals. What part of what you said was supposed to be undesirable?
> fine with anyone in power going after any company's senior leadership which makes a "clear intentional and systematic nature of repeated misstatements" while committing crimes violating privacy laws 40 million times
You’re describing a wet dream for Silicon Valley’s elites. Reducing the courts’ ability to check prosecutorial discretion is an ongoing project there.
Beating someone with a stick isn't the only way to cause harm. And if you cause harm to 40 million people, you should be held accountable - it should be treated as a crime.
In case it hasn’t become abundantly clear to everyone by now: this is how Facebook operates. The people who do this stuff get promoted, and vice versa. This will keep happening until those people are scared straight, and the incentive structure that turns people into this are abolished.
Honestly it doesn’t matter what they get them on, half of the PMC in America needs to be indicted on RICO charges for white collar crimes against humanity
Deranged statement here
So our obsession with jail is nuts, because... you lean towards no one willfully signed off on a lie, in a company with a history like Meta/Facebook, in a $25B fine?
Full presidential pardons go for just a couple of million, a rounding error on that fine. Invoking social media and complaining about a democrat judge or deep state conspiracy and forking over the money using the right attorneys is all it takes. Nobody with that kind of resources will go to jail.
I'm sure the crime reached into all 50 states. Maybe they should be tried and sentenced in all of them, so avoiding jail would need 51 pardons instead of just one.
I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.
> I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.
He can and he did, it just does not work.
But he can make the governor do it, which did work at least once.
And your source of information is internet hearsay, I gather?
Just this week the New York Times reported the case of a venezolan banker who received a pardon after hiring a former lawyer of the president. There probably will be litigation if they misreport it so this does not seem hearsay to me.
AI readily provided me a list of 8 other well documented cases of "pay for pardons" and offered detailed research on all of them.
The CEO is the only one with decision power and is responsible for all crimes. The CEO is also the one making the most money off the crimes. If we don't actual jail them, crimes will keep increasing as we are witnessing. AI companies are now bragging about their crimes publicly.
Good is arresting a CEO and holding them in prison for a few decades. These fines do nothing. These fines are the enemy of good.
Besides, aren't C-levels usually the ones that justify their huge compensation by claiming that they deserve it because they take the big risks?
Big risk of being fired maybe while receiving humongous payoff. Ridiculous.
Golden parachutes mitigate those risks. The company may tank, but they get theirs.
Sorry, who claims this? Sounds like you’re confused
Hold them in jail pending trial. They are the definition of flight risk.
If corporations are people, then they should face the exact same punishment as a person. If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff.
> If any individual perpetrated this level of fraud they might be spending the rest of their life in jail. See: bernie madhoff
…what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
How is the circle of passing draconian laws instead of proportional response then driving draconian regimes to abuse that permit not a lesson we can learn?
>what is the factual basis for comparing this to Madoff?
the jury's ruling?
- extraordinary number of willful violations found by the jury - the duration and repetition of the conduct - the breadth of subjects on which violations occurred - the involvement of senior Facebook leadership - the size of New Mexico audiences reached - clear intentional and systematic nature of Facebook’s repeated misstatements
That's an extremely high bar to hit and Facebook cleared it. Madoff's scheme, even adjusted for inflation, tops out around 200b dollars or so. Facebook clears the overall financial bar by a whole magnitude, and its effects were felt globally.
You seem very fixated on downplaying just how historical a case this (and/or proceeding cases against FB) will be. This will easily go down in the same lane as cigarettes on how people remember this era.
>How is the circle of passing draconian laws
Do I really need to bring out the Martin Luther King Jr. quote here just because we're so fixated on legalities? Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well.
> Let's remember nothing cigarette companies did were illegal as well
What are you getting at? That we should jail people for not breaking laws?
The fact that you're comparing this to fucking Hitler is insane. Even you know it, which is why you were too embarrassed to say it.
A sole proprietor would also only face financial damages, not jail time. Employees can be charged with criminal charges. Corporations don't protect from that.
The problem with fines is that they don't actually disincentivize bad behavior by companies, as long as they are large enough to absorb the fine as a cost of doing business.
Time in the pokey is unpleasant for everyone.
The problem with fines is that they don't actually disincentivize bad behaviour by decision makers.
Corporations don't make decisions, individuals do.
You could argue if we hit the business hard enough, the individual making those decisions maybe suffers from.. maybe... less bonus? but, well....
Sorry but it sounds like you think "limited liability" should only be understood to refer to corporate debts and bankruptcy proceedings and that "corporate personhood" should be understood as a legal fiction to make things simpler for bureaucrats.
That's crazy talk. Did you miss the part where corporations are actually people?
The fines are not big enough if the companies can just absorb the blow like that. $25B is not large enough to be a problem for Facebook. Add two more digits and the executives would be running to their doomsday bunkers.
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now. There might be an obsession, but it's only about jailing peons.
> If we were really obsessed with jail for executives, a lot more of them would be locked up right now
This is the opposite of what happens in any incarceration-happy culture. See: the French Revolution. The rich got away, got richer, in fact. The machines of terror inevitable turned on the poor. Liberties are most valuable to those of us who are not billionaires.
Sure, but we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get.
If I do something to fuck over this many people and harm society this much I’m going to jail. No billionaire is having the same consequences.
Until that changes you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution in a gamble to maybe give consequences to those in charge. Hell that’s more than half the reason we got Trump.
Also I’m going to call out your analysis of the French Revolution as failing entirely as poor. Some of the rich got richer but people wanted the kings head and they definitely got it.
> we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get
Sure. Light a bonfire. Scream and windmills. And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
> you are going to have people be willing to back table flipping movements like the French Revolution
The rich got richer in the French Revolution! America’s rich want that.
> And then come to your senses and realises lowering the bar for criminality will absolutely not limits its blast radius to the people you want it to.
If you’re already in the blast radius of the current system, why would you care if it expands if you think it might include the people fucking you over in the first place?
I’m not disagreeing that there are problems that could result from this idea. I’m disagreeing with you on the idea that people are crazy for wanting this while there’s this class of people who do whatever they want whenever they want to the rest of us.
Like I pointed out with the French king loosing his head during the French Revolution. The fact that one of those people had consequences is worth it to a lot of people even if it means the rest of the noble class is even more empowered.
They are already beyond consequence generally, more power for them doesn’t change the relationship between the common man and the nobles.
You saw the same emotional situation play out with Luigi Mangiones actions despite having scant effect on the system.
I don't think "holding rich people to the same standard as the peasants" is equivalent to "lowering the bar for criminality"
In fact, I'd go so far as saying it's much closer to "keep the bar for criminality where it is, but apply it to everyone equally" but personally I'd add a little addendum about scaling up the punishment for crimes by those with greater influence and responsibilities to the people, but that's just me
China jails executives, they just sentenced the CEO of evergrande to life, with a death penalty suspended sentence.
They do this despite jailing fewer people in total (not just per-capita) than America.
One could say that this is because Xi is untouchable but I think it's more about the social norms. Americans can't even consider a world where we prosecute the powerful.
Our system consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I would agree except jail time is what all us peons face for all sorts of far more benign charges. So until poor people's punishments are lessened they are going to advocate for greater punishment for these crimes.
The whole purpose of companies is that the bankruptcy of a company will not ruin entrepreneurs and strip them of all their belongings. You have the possibility of failing softly. That's a good thing because it enables you to take a calculated risk. But that risk is usually just money.
When a company, for example its managers through willful negligence or an outright lie, enables the organization to do something that is considered illegal, they absolutely should be held personally responsible. The existence of a company as an entity shields the entrepreneurship itself, not individuals who are actively harming others.
Managers who willingly poisoned people with cigarettes or lead, and now with brain rot, while simultaneously claiming that it is not harmful to the public, even when they know that is simply a lie, should absolutely be held responsible.
>> where's the jail time for executives
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts
I am European and I want those American executives in jail as well /s
But in all seriousness, shareholders in 2026 should start pushing for an investment markets reform to introduce criminal responsibility for such actions, because that's a pretty good deterrent to have the executives not act against their fiduciary duty and the shareholders' bottom line.
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
We rarely imprison the people who actually deserve it. Even when we do, it's barely a punishment if the person is wealthy.
Our jails are full, but a lot of that is we harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves. And that's mostly because the grift of for-profit prisons.
Our jails are full, relative to other developed countries, because we have vastly higher rates of crime. Our laws, by design, hamper the ability of the state to "harshly punish mundane crimes against people with no real ability to defend themselves". Talk to any cop in any metro area of note; everyone knows who the criminals are by name and face, but they remain largely out there to offend and reoffend because it's hard (again, by design) to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
> the grift of for-profit prisons
Only a single-digit percentage of prisoners are in for-profit prisons, and roughly half of the states do not use them at all. I dislike them for the obvious perverse incentive, but it's a great exaggeration to say that the system puts largely innocent people in prison to line the pockets of for-profit prison execs.
For better or worse, American society is very good at sorting people, so the HN crowd and other intelligentsia usually doesn't encounter the bottom 5% that wreak havoc.
>because we have vastly higher rates of crime.
And guess what the top reason is for incarceration are? Hint: it beats out sex offences and weapons/arson. And it started right after a certain announcement in the 70's that was largely admitted to increasing incarceration rates.
https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
It's widely known that drug offenses are easier ways to stick criminals (who perpetrate crimes other than drug offenses) in prison, analogous to how in the end they convicted Al Capone of tax evasion. There is no epidemic of mere consumers of controlled substances going to prison, at least not in the past decade or longer.
Besides, you can look at the straightforward statistic of homicides to gauge the overall criminality of a population. The US has a homicide rate an order of magnitude higher than its peer countries. By this measure, the US actually has an under-incarceration problem, not one of over-incarceration. Wikipedia has the US incarceration rate at 542 per 100k, compared to Sweden at 92, Switzerland at 77, or South Korea at 115; compare that to the intentional homicide rates of the US at 5.763 per 100k, Sweden at 0.867, Switzerland at 0.504, and South Korea at 0.489. If incarceration scaled with the homicide rate, those other countries are actually much more prison-heavy than the US!
> prove it beyond a reasonable doubt
Except that proving it is rarely necessary because the system relies on plea deals and because the 6th amendment is not automatically enforced. There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial.
Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative (and which winds up encouraging recidivism and compounding the problem further). Things have improved over the past 20 years but we have not done enough to address the problem.
> There are places in the US where the criminal justice system would break down if every defendant refused a plea deal and demanded a speedy trial
I'm actually not aware of any place in the US that routinely administers what could be considered a speedy trial. It's a shame, really, but perhaps an inevitable side-effect of the ever-increasing burden on the part of the prosecution. Pre-Warren Court, it was normal for criminal cases to take days between arrest and trial.
> Our jails are full because we have unnecessarily long sentences and a prison system that is meant to be punitive instead of rehabilitative
I make the point in a sibling comment that the US actually has lower incarceration rates compared to its peer nations, relative to their homicide rates. Our jails are full because we have a lot more crime. We can agree to disagree on the "root causes" thereof.
I am not sure what "relative to the homicide rate" is supposed to prove. The homicide rate is not the same as the homicide conviction rate, or put another way, perhaps we have a lower incarceration rate relative to our homicide rate compared to other countries because we are solving a smaller fraction of homicides compared to those countries.
(Also possible, but I suspect less likely, is that our homicide rate is higher but not in proportion to the number of murderers; maybe we have a bigger problem with serial killers than other countries, and thus have fewer murderers to incarcerate relative to the homicide rate.)
I'm in complete agreement about the perfect being the enemy of the good. Complaining about this outcome serves very little purpose.
But this case was about selling out democracy. I suppose it falls into the category of great crimes like killing people with cigarettes and deceiving the public and regulators while doing it. If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way.
The American attitude about and system of incarceration is pretty crazy, but so is our idea of scale in crime. At the retail end of our criminal so-called justice system, you have cops that in many places fragrantly engage in overtime and detail fraud, sometimes amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars, putting minor criminals in prison and penury. It's all pretty crazy.
> If you steal from the rich and powerful you go to prison, but killing tens to hundreds of thousands of children in Africa is too abstract to punish that way
This crosses jurisdictions. We have no international legal system that doesn’t rely on voluntary cooperation.
If you’re claiming that every car- and bicycle-theft victim is a billionaire, idk what to tell you.
Oh bike thieves are lower than dog poop, for sure. My ambivalence stems from the cop who might catch that thief stealing 100X more from the municipality in the form of overtime fraud. The rot is in play at every level of scale.
Also you don't need international justice to find criminality in how DOGE was done.
> Our American obsession with jail is nuts.
Sure but also there has to be some sort of deterrent and an executive who's worth is $100M+ who can't touch their $100M because their in jail is far more of a deterrent than META missing its earnings for a quarter because they owe the government a one-time slap on the wrist.
I'm all ears on what a different penalty could be that ultimately stops this behavior.
PS - META's stock is currently up 2% in after hours trading, so
Yes, our obsession with jail is nuts. Why do I only hear people say so in response to populist calls to throw corporate executives in prison for actual crimes?
Executives cant goto jail, they are already taking responsibilty.
I don’t understand your comment.
I assume it's the typical "accepting responsibility" of execs and politicians where nothing happens. Best case they throw some underling under the bus or have their institution pay a fine. But they themselves have no consequences
Im making fun of the double speak used by the media when they use the word responsibility following the company doing something wrong.
The judgement here was for violation of civil law, not criminal law. If New Mexico would have gone after the executives, the result would have been a much smaller fine, not jail. Or are you suggesting the executives should have been prosecuted for some criminal law violation? If so, what?
We imprison or fine to motivate others not to do the same. I doubt the current treatment is potent enough.
> This will keep happening until those at the top are held personally responsible for the crimes they sign off on.
Cambridge Analytica was a decade ago and there hasn’t been a similar Meta scandal since, so it seems like the deterrent has worked.
LOL. had a good laugh. thanks
The literal point of incorporation is that you as a shareholder or proprietor of a business are legally separated from the corporation in the eyes of the law.
We need reforms on corporate governance. Right now Meta is basically Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of bag holders. They can't vote him out because he has both a board seat and majority voting power all on his own. Dumping the stock is far from a safe thing for institutional investors to do if they want to avoid lawsuits or regulatory attention.
It needs to be illegal for you to both be the CEO of a publicly-traded company and the voting majority shareholder. Note I say majority, not major plurality.
There is no law or regulation which requires institutional investors to hold Meta stock. Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement, and investment managers have significant flexibility unless there's something more specific in their own organizational bylaws. They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
> Sometimes people who don't actually understand the law make spurious claims that those investors are legally required as fiduciaries to put their funds into the highest yielding investments. But in reality there is no such requirement
The requirement is what a lawyer can convince a dozen jurors the requirement should be. If there's a lawsuit against a fund manager at an institutional investor saying "you didn't fulfill your duty as a fiduciary because x", there's at least some risk that x becomes a real responsibility for fiduciaries through the outcome of that case. If the zeitgeist dictates that as a responsibility, it is a responsibility.
> They can underweight Meta stock if they believe it's overvalued due to potential legal risks or corporate governance problems or whatever.
The fact that they aren't doing so when the company is losing billions of dollars in legal judgments would suggest either
1) They can't do so because they would lose money doing so
or
2) Our system is in need of reform so that when executives direct a company in such a way that it is routinely facing legal exposure, shareholders remove those executives so that corporations act as better citizens and things are handled at the shareholder meeting level instead of the court system level.
And there it is, another ignorant HN user making an uninformed claim about legal issues they don't understand with no actual case law citations to back it up.
It's a jury system. If they manage to get a dozen people through voir dire that dislike the state of the social media market enough, they can, in theory, find Meta liable. Maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Anyone who performs criminal actions while working at a corporation may be charged with criminal charges
Idk if Mark really is an android as they suggest, how do you jail a robot?
the chinese legal system somehow in its flaws is able to hold powerful company execs to account.
whereas here in the states - once you're a billionaire - jail or being held personally liable is a foreign concept.
Unless you're Sam Bankman-Fried, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Allen Stanford, Raj Rajaratnam, Michael Milken...
As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change. We really need to reassess this perverse concept of a corporation where you can simply commit crimes against people, personally profit, yet never be personally held responsible, let alone accountable.
The same thing is causing problems in the financial markets right now, with massive zombie company portfolios of various private equity firms still paying out fees to the managers to siphon off the debt and assets of investors.
> As long as a corporation is a shield to commit crimes with impunity, nothing will change.
AI simply makes it easier for corporations to commit crimes with impunity, now they can distance themselves from responsibility even further. No one has even bothered to levy fines for AI agents hacking or corporations violating copyright to train their models.
Corporations shield shareholders from civil liability not operators from criminal charges. You seem to have no concept at all what a corporate shield is or the difference between criminal and civil law
It's a problem with the law too, but corporations still effectively shield individuals from criminal prosecution for things individuals would be prosecuted for by breaking up accountability among many different people/groups of people.
any organization of people does that lol
Just takes one line to change a civil law into a criminal one, “and shall serve a term of imprisonment of not less than . . .”
Pardons are a cool million away, maybe a bit more if you are Zuck, because the big guy is not going to let in opportunity to extract more pass him by
Fines are just permits for companies that can afford it.
I want a new season of Oz starring Zuck.
If they get more decisions like this and they're overextended with AI investment, they'll be pretty fucked. Of course, the cockroaches will scuttle away without penalty.
For those who haven't seen, the New Mexico Attorney General released tapes of the depositions for Zuckerberg [1] and Sandberg [2].
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4
The comments on Zuck's are funny
Typical "lawyer is so stupid, she's asking dumb questions, repetitive questions"
Yeah, people - it's a deposition. Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for
Weirdly, I was talking to someone earlier about this who had been deposed.
They ask repeated questions repetitive questions hoping that you slip up/contradict yourself.
He said it was an interest experience trying to repeat exactly the same answers he’d already given.
Why doesn’t your lawyer just say “asked and answered”
> Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for
That but also I would imagine getting information on the record from the exhibits etc.
Thank you for the links! The snarky gotcha-style questions is surprisingly humanizing for the person being deposed.
It's a deposition
All the states that participated in the class action settlement got $725 million combined.
New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
Great timing for the AG who’s up for reelection on November 3 (even though it was the previous AG who made the call).
>New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion.
No because that's still subject to appeal, unlike the settlement. "a bird in hand is worth two in the bush", etc.
That’s all framing. If they use the win for their reelection campaign…they just won’t mention the appeals process.
What are the grounds for the appeal? How does NM law look on that issue? It's a significantly reduced judgment too.
Like, yeah, you have a point in the abstract, but barring any actual supportive facts, it doesn't seem like a good point.
IANAL, but it's not hard to find answers with a trivial search, eg.
https://kieferandkiefer.com/understanding-how-jury-verdicts-...
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R331...
It's not a jury verdict, and I am a lawyer...
Also, a paper from RAND from 1987? Are you for real?
I'm just a standard idiot, but didn't the jury return a verdict and the judge impose a penalty per found violation as a result here? https://nmcourts.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Findings-and...
Genuinely curious and interested in learning!
It's a very good point. The further upon appeal Meta goes, the more removed they get from a jury and they'll be more likely to get a favorable ruling due to the company's negative approval rating amongst the public
Presumably it’s also easier to influence judges than random jurors.
It's not a jury verdict. Crazy how much that needs to be repeated in this thread.
No one reads the article anymore. They're just vibe commenting.
A jury is involved in the process. If the jury doesn't find violations, the judge can't assign penalties for those violations.
> The jury concluded that Meta had more than 43 million violations of the state’s unfair practices act, with each transgression carrying a civil penalty as high as $5,000.
Note that this is like, 20 violations per resident of New Mexico. And also ~50% of Facebook's total revenue (more than 100% of income) at the time of the CA scandal.
They got an outlandish $25B in their local kangaroo court. It'll be appealed and hopefully reduced.
What makes it outlandish?
Outlandish on its face. In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
Look at precedent[1]. Glyphosate and J&J talc are among the biggest awards (to be fair: they were settlements), and those allege that the defendants' products actually caused cancer -- actually killed people.
The tobacco settlement for 46 states was $206 billion. Again, for causing millions of deaths. New Mexico is 0.62% of the U.S. population, so less than $2 billion would be New Mexico's share of that.
Compare that to this 25 billion for the crime of illicitly letting political advertisers access too much of the interest data that Facebook users provided to Facebook?
The only way this penalty makes any sense is if you believe that the Cambridge Analytica scandal was the most heinous crime ever perpetrated by any company in U.S. history.
[1] https://verdictwiki.com/landmark-cases/
Yeah, that makes sense. On the other hand, the severity of the crime isn't what makes the penalty high in this case. The fine for the crime in this case is $5,000. Given that the penalty was reduced by nearly 90%, the penalty for the crime is something like $570. That doesn't seem outlandish to me.
It's $11,737 per current resident of New Mexico by my math. So, 20+ offenses per resident of the state? Of course, many people weren't even Facebook users, so it must be even more offenses per user.
And they reduced it, so we're already admitting that the penalty is based on vibes and not simply an unbiased calculation. So it's just the whims of this particular judge that says the right number is $25,000,000,000.00 and not $250,000,000,000.00. Sounds like that number is no more justified than $25,000,000.00 or $25.
> In short, shouldn't the amount of money you expect for a fine be at least vaguely proportional to the harms caused?
No. Fines are punitive and intended for deterrence. You're thinking of reimbursements (cost recovery and damages). The latter is intended to be proportional to real world harm/costs, the former need not be.
A traffic law violation could cause no harm, but you'll still get fined for it.
Some jurisdictions even impose fines based on how deep the defendants' wallet is, calculating the amount that might serve as appropriate deterrent/punishment based on their financial situation. Fining a billionare $50,000 for literring will still not serve as a deterrent, but doing the same to a minimum wage worker would unfairly financially ruin them.
OK fine, it's about deterrence. Explain why are trying 100x more vigorously to deter the category 'advertising-based infractions' (which the majority of the 'victims' still don't even know happened, let alone experience any pain and suffering from) than 'negligently giving people cancer and killing them'?
This is about emotion and resentment about social media. I get it. I hate social media too. But it's absurd to levy such a fine for petty data misuse - especially considering this is just going to pad state coffers. The state wasn't harmed here! If you take the position that New Mexicans will never be the same again, then that $11,737 per New Mexico resident should go to the residents. All of it. Write them checks.
You could sue Facebook for $25 trillion and a local jury would unanimously vote yes. These numbers don’t mean anything. This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney. You think they'd have trouble finding 12 jurors in Santa Fe, NM who dislike big tech? It is always shut down or massively reduced by a higher court.
That's not what happened here though. The penalties were defined by law, the jurors applied them. The judge already reduced most of the penalty. So... what about this case is outlandish?
All such "let's multiply one large number with another large number followed by a third large number to come up with hundreds of billions in penalities" calculations never hold up in appeals. Otherwise if the logic was sound and there were actually 43 million violations then why was it reduced from $219.5 billion to $25 billion in the first place? Like I said everyone is making up numbers, and the appeals court will make up another one.
There is plenty of precedent for Cambridge Analytica-related fines. California got $50 million. 40-ish states combined got something like $460 million. New Mexico will get paid in the same range.
I don't know why the judge reduced the penalty as the article didn't state that. I don't really have anything to go on other than you saying everyone is just making up numbers. I don't find that argument convincing given my experience with the courts.
>This kind of “small town folk vs giant out-of-state corporation” fight is an automatic win for any state attorney.
Yeah maybe in movies
It already was. According to NM law, the sum of fines for the 43 million violations Facebook committed against New Mexico would have been $219B, but the judge was feeling kind that day.
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
No. $219B is the absolute maximum theoretical fine assessable at $5000/violation x 43 million counts. The $25B number is still ridiculous. Either the number of counts is too high (seems likely at 20x the population of NM) or the assessment per count is too high, but regardless, they need to arrive at a lower number.
"New Mexico decided to go it alone and gets $25 billion."
I highly doubt that New Mexico will get 25. Although it would be nice since I live in New Mexico.
The class action was private, not initiated by states.
There have been many different lawsuits and fines over Cambridge Analytica.
$50 million settlement with California.
$100 million to SEC for misleading investors.
$5 billion in FTC fines.
Many different international fines.
$725 million in a private class action lawsuit.
$17 billion in a multi-state child and teen safety lawsuit, part of which is earmarked for Cambridge Analytica claims.
(You are probably confusing the last two).
Importantly all of these were paid. This $25 billion one is still just a press release. Local juries issue such crazy rulings all the time (why wouldn’t they, they have nothing to lose) and it is always struck down or massively reduced by a higher court.
"gets" is certainly a word choice. There is about a 0% chance NM get's anywhere near $25 billion
Meta will surely appeal, and will likely get the fine reduced to like 10% of that. But for comparison, in the recent multistate settlement over social media addiction by 47 states for $17 billion, there was a provision in that settlement to get $459 million [1] in exchange for releasing Meta from any state claims related to Cambridge Analytica. So those 47 states got $459 million for what New Mexico will likely get a few billion for.
[1] https://www.techpolicy.press/the-459-million-cambridge-analy...
Meta already got it to ~10%, but is trying to get it to ~1%. During the trial, it was determined that the total fine based on all violations to be $219B
https://www.neowin.net/news/new-mexico-judge-slashes-metas-p...
I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot. I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
Yes, I remember an article in the Guardian about this, around 2015-6
Facebook does this. People think 'privacy' as a complaint and perhaps think about advertising on FB but straight up, settings get reset (including posts suddenly becoming Public. or graph search.)
Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in it. In 2010 he said privacy was no longer a social norm. Not only does he himself not believe in it, but he can't keep it to himself. He knows 'better than you'. So, he outright changes it himself or instructs his engineers to do it
It's like with Free Basics in India. You could, theoretically, support it. Many didn't, it was a form of digital colonialism. But let's say you happened to think it was a good idea. It didn't matter either way: Facebook sent emails on users' behalf to TRAI
That's who Zuckerberg is. A sociopath, a criminal, someone who knows nothing but how to steal
> I remember long ago, you could fully hide your profile from ANY type of search. Now you cannot.
Do you have any more details on that? Are you talking about searches within Facebook or outside of it?
I also remember long before they started scanning your face, they added an opt-out checkbox, I'm pretty sure this disappeared for a long time. You know that feature where they'd auto-suggest who to tag? Yea, you could bar them from using your face for that, now Facebook has taken a steaming pile of... on your privacy at levels I've never seen them pull before.
Do you have any more details on that?
25B is not a small fine. Finally an amount that should make them think twice their harming decisions
They don't care.
Meta can take the hit by either selling stock, laying of more employees or both to cover that cost.
Or they can put thick mitts on Zuckerberg's hands for a couple of years so he can't sign any checks.
You're being sarcastic, right? Right? It's a 1.5 trillion dollar company [1], how would this amount even be relevant compared to the profits they made from their behavior.
[1] https://youtu.be/C7UC2ie0XIE?t=49
Maybe the $25B isn't guaranteed and doesn't seriously harm them on its own, but if the legal landscape shifts enough to make fines of this scale more common than the usual dozens-to-hundreds of millions, then it starts to impact their bottom line.
The problem is that it's not a fine for the directors, it's a fine for the company itself.
It won't trickle down to the directors' salaries, so then there's no reason for them to act any differently in future.
Directors of companies should be personally financially liable for these types of penalties.
When the appeals reach the Supreme Court, if the S.C. should rule against Meta, Zuck will probably remember "wait a minute, I wiped my ass with $25B this morning, I'll just pay the fine, who cares."
Too large, if I may say such a thing.
It is pretty small for a company like Facebook, take a look at their quarterly revenue and the various credit facilities and sources of financing they have available. They could shrug off a one-time $25B fine.
You need another one or two digits before you can say it is "not a small fine."
12% of annual revenue (~200B for 2025). Not a small amount.
You mean 200B?
meta makes $1.4B/week in net profit, so that's about 4 months of net profits
And kids got fined 1/2M for downloading a few mp3s...
This is just for new mexico, a relatively small state in a single country facebook operates in. It's probably a solid decade worth of profit in that state. Because their privacy policy that no one reads wasn't clear enough.
lol that was a fun typo. Fixed :)
~50% of 2018 revenue, which is when the CA scandal was happening.
It’s hilarious that one of the outcomes of Meta cozying up with the current administration to escape scrutiny at the Federal level has been 50+ state attorneys general prosecuting them instead.
Holy! This might be the first time I've seen a meta fine that actually feels substantial enough for them to change behaviours. That's impressive.
This is incredibly almost $12,000 per New Mexican resident. I wonder how much they will actually pocket after attorney's fees and appeals?
If this is out of the NM AG, they're probably using house attorneys -- no fees. It is likely to be appealed and reduced in appeal.
The AG was in charge of the prosecution of the case but they wisely didn't handle it all by themselves. New Mexico was represented in court by DiCello Levitt LLP and McGinn Montoya Love Curry & Sievers. Each probably stand to make billions if the award is upheld.
https://dicellolevitt.com/new-mexico-secures-resounding-jury...
> “This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to this enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” Mahoney said in the statement.
Looks like New Mexico wins in multiple ways if this is upheld.
Stock seems to have shot up ~7% aftermarket so just cost of business.
They beat revenue expectations, and earnings per share was ok, and they guided for even higher revenue next quarter above estimates ofc.
Somehow Meta is making money despite starting to loose DAUs now. So honestly I don't quite understand what's what, also most of the big income is from Ads and biggest Ads spenders are startups and companies heavily dependent on VCs and AI... So it's definitely somewhat circular, and Ads is the most recession affected business so a down turn in markets will cycle through it.
But ngl if all the earnings are this ok then hyperscalers stock might not crash this quarter, well then again I didn't think they would but a person could dream.
I am quite bullish on AI, but would prefer the fluff to get out of the way asap, otherwise don't want it to happen at a bad time, and too many people get caught pants down.
Hell didn’t they stop even reporting DAU’s?
they now do something called, Meta Family daily active people, similar thing but aggregate of all Meta stuff. very sus imho.
WeWork made their weird adjusted revenue number and everyone lost their minds. Facebook makes up KPI’s that fly in the face of decades of industry standard and we’re just supposed to accept it lol
Their users are ad execs and data brokers
If you're on IG, it's pretty obvious how they're getting more ad revenue. They're serving up more ads through stories/reels and the ads have become less conspicuous over time. e.g. you're watching a story and only a few seconds into the story does the ad overlay appear whereas before you can tell it's an ad from the beginning.
Escaping litigation with a fine is always a good outcome, no matter how large the penalty. Stock price will drop the day governments start regulating these companies or breaking them up.
I've always been fond of the idea of putting a corporation in "jail" where any presence they have is shuttered for the duration, bank accounts are frozen, and locations are to be uninhabited except by third party security.
They can hire lawyers to argue it out while they sit in limbo like the rest of us.
Imagine if Amazon ran afoul of the law and AWS was offline in corporate jail for a day? It'd be motication to never, ever risk that happening.
Other countries also have a concept of the corporate death penalty. But it has not happened in the US for something like a century.
Well Meta is reacting to all the costs by just starting to charge for things previously free, like sharing links.
I suspect they are now entering the Earthlink/AOL phase where they squeeze every last dime out of the confused and abandoned senior citizens left on the platform until they die off.
Meta also owns the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 14th largest social media platforms behind facebook.
3.6 billion people use a Meta app every day - 43% of the world's population.
True. But seeing them lose an arm would be proof the monster can be killed.
I'm saying I don't think we'll see that. Yes, many people I know have left facebook but I think that's an artifact of me being in a bubble rather than it being a global trend.
I am more optimistic. People are addicted to targeted content, but local LLMs are already great at this. I have an agent that manages my local playlists and operates my own local spotify from a consumer GPU.
And youtube, same thing. I have not actually used youtube in years. Local software downloads video files from their servers, strips all the ads and sponsored content, and shows me the ones most interesting to me.
Once that is easy for everyone to do with software and weights-on-silicon embedded in next gen phones, the entire value prop of these networks starts to fall apart.
Between that and endless fines and negative movies coming out, I think they can be killed, or at least not a thing kids are allowed near anymore.
Respectfully, you're in a bubble and few people really give a shit. Installing an ad-blocker is a ridiculously trivial exercise today, and it's now built-in to several popular browsers, but still 2/3 of internet users are not using one -- about 4 billion people.
Also, how do you scrape videos from YouTube after you "kill it"? YouTube's value is not contained within their web frontend. YouTube is popular because of the network effect they've built by providing massive amounts of free hosting for expensive-to-host content. An LLM does absolutely nothing to undermine that. And, if it ever became a threat to their bottom line, they'd just force users to use a trusted client. They don't bother now because the number of people doing what you're doing rounds to zero.
This seems to be a consequence of the Cambridge Analytica. Could it be that we'll see some consequences?
Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?
Q3 earnings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187025
Obama was allowed to collect just as much private information during his campaign. The tech community called him a 'genius'.
Hillary used Cambridge Analytica in almost the same way (this is where the Trumo campaign got the idea).
When the Democrats can get away with literal murder in many cases, I stop taking outrage like this seriously.
If Democrats in power are just going to break the law, why should I follow it?
>When the Democrats can get away with literal murder in many cases...
>If Democrats in power are just going to break the law...
Citation? And do you think that one person breaking the law absolves someone else?
They will appeal, as usual, and never pay that.
This will be successfully appealed. It is an outrageous verdict for something with zero actual harms.
People are not notifying this nearly enough, but Meta is still going up and at it in Brazil [1] during one of the most polarized elections I've ever seen during my time.
Things got so ridiculous that Meta's AI WhatsApp companion would let you generate one candidate's posters, but flat-out deny you the same prompt for the opposition. Of course the bias skewed heavily towards benefiting the alt-right, pro-MAGA party.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/meta-employees-said-l...
Thanks for continuing to talk about this. It's ridiculous how much the US meddles in the elections of others and acts all :surprised-pikachu: when Russia sorta kinda meddles a bit in ONE election of their own.
The Bolsanaro family is ofc a close ally of Trump
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/21/battle-meta-al...
We even have Meta employees calling the meddling out: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/10/16/meta-employees-...
The book Careless People paints a picture of Zuck & Co that should cause anyone to hesitate to touch any of their products. It's a shame so much of the world runs on WhatsApp. It's a bigger shame that they were ever allowed to acquire WhatsApp in the first place.
Woah, I remember hearing about the Cambridge Analytica stuff for the first time in 2020 from watching "The Social Dilemma". I'm surprised there is still legal fall out from that. Also 15% interest until the fine is paid in full is wild. Wonder where they are going to get the cash given how much has been going to AI.
That's just New Mexico. I wonder when will the other states step up, and hit them with more fines?
Just waiting for the orange one to say New Mexico is socialist and change the name because we cant have a state named after illegals.
he already said they need to change their name to New America, surprising no one
I’m fairly sure that most other states have already entered into an agreement preventing them from prosecuting about Cambridge analytica in exchange for a couple hundred million each (IANAL)
I rarely cry but my eyes just got wet. It feels so good.
Not enough.
finally some proper penalty OOMs
That penalty is almost 1/3 of a Metaverse. That's got to sting!
Can they appeal it?
> Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney criticized the penalty, saying in a statement that the company is “confident” that it will “prevail on appeal.”
Will Meta be able to apeal?
Previously when the EU has ordered US companies to pay penalties of a "few billion EUR" for trade abuse there has typically been a lot of jingoistic outrage here. This one will be interesting to watch.
America fines their companies left and right but won't allow other countries to do for the same wrongdoings.
Its very easy to understand the motives but other countries lack back bone to ban these companies
Other countries fine American companies all the time.
cost of doing business
They were originally sued for, what, half a trillion?
Pennies on the dollar.
New Mexico DOJ release: https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of...
How much is Cambridge Analytica going to have to pay? I'm all for ramming Meta, but I feel like they should be forced to pay the same amount.
$0. for better or worse, they have ceased operations and declared bankruptcy. I don't think NM would/could expect to get any money from a penalty. I may misunderstand how penalties and bankruptcy work, but I would expect it's been a better use of time to try to get $$$ from Meta than a defunct entity.
How much is a bankrupt non-existent company going to pay? You tell me..
Diseconomies of scale.
Jury based punitive damages are constantly overturned because they are not legal experts and don't understand anything.
Anyone who thinks Meta will actually pay this amount have no clue what they're talking about.
The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.
They are also not punitive damages, and Meta was also found to be willful.
> While the full amount of the penalty against Meta, based on thousands of violations of state law, was calculated as $219bn, Judge Mathew reduced the penalty to the $25bn fine.
umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen.
They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
Otherwise it's just cost of business.
They will likely not even have to pay $25B bc they will continue to appeal till they get a more favorable ruling
Are you proposing that as part of this settlement, Meta should have to delete the posts and likes and facebook accounts of users in New Mexico?
That would unironically dramatically improve the world. Knock out Florida and Texas next please!
Not necessarily the accounts or posts. They can be made to delete all the profiling data that they've collected over the years and be barred from inferring anything from user submitted past data and new data for a few years.
Basically they shouldn't be able to monetize that data in any form directly or indirectly, even if they don't delete it.
> umm when a thief steals and gets caught, we don't just punish them. We also recover what was stolen. > > They should also be made to delete all user data collected during the period, and pause similar data collection for x months/years even the ones that fall under their service terms. The price of wrong doing should be high, and for meta deleting historical user data is the highest form of punishment .
How was the data stolen from users? Do the users no longer have access to their own data? Was it deleted from their devices?
If the data was not "stolen", then asking them to delete is also not "recovery".
The Cambridge Analytica "scandal" is basically an advertising campaign for Meta itself. Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
> Much worse is how Meta enabled a genocide in Myanmar.
True, and considering the gravity of this situation, you'd think they're would've been more legal consequences for FB/Meta
I see similar dynamics happening on X, where it is just being used to spread hate and division.
Perhaps it's high time we had an international criminal justice system for social media companies.
There are much worse scandals internal to meta that get ignored because 8200.
Onavo is one that would really sink meta in a fair world. But I guess fealty to Mossad keeps that one out of the news (and the courts). The firehose into Palantir for about a decade is another. Scuba is another. I could go on for days, bit someone will probably bump me off.
Ad campaign? We are lucky they didn’t make the settlement in “Meta Quest Cash” or “Ad Buy Credit”
They absolutely tried at one point or another.
>Their ad platform worked exactly as designed: it allowed creepy, microtargeted advertisements. Instead of dish soap, peptides, and dropshipped garbage, it sold a political candidate.
No? The scandal was that random "apps" (eg. quizzes) were able to scrape user and their friends' profile data. The expansion of that into ad targeting as a whole is just a retcon you're doing.
> In the 2010s, personal data belonging to millions of Facebook users was collected by British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informed consent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
Yes? They used Facebook APIs in conjunction with their own data points. This is basically all of "ad tech."
Yeah it is kind of sad how not stopping posts which fueled a literal genocide is hardly glanced at but Cambridge Analytica is considered a disaster of the highest order. Who died from Cambridge Analytica?
Pay to play
Anything less than a jail cell is less than the top brass of Meta deserve.
If they actually pay $25B, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I might even eat two of my hats
The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.
Honestly, this company is uninvestable if you have even a shred of morality.. but, even if you lack morality, you must see the writing on the wall re: their lingering risks.
Meta is the cigarette company of the modern era and if our historians are allowed to write a neutral take on this era, they will likely not be kind to meta.
25 bil is no where near enough for privacy damages, let alone what they'll have to deal with on the addiction damages down the road.
Philip Morris stock is up 100% over the last 5 years. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PM/
Not bad for tobacco company that everybody presumably shuns.
i hate that zuck has his ad empire funding all sort of stupid shit. Nothing can even touch him as long as ad dollars keep flowing.
why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform. i hate it so much.
Ads are successful everywhere. The size of facebook's userbase helped its ads reach a lot of people, but the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death.
Facebook has done nothing but demonstrate that it's a company which doesn't care at all about its users and is willing to hurt them. Anyone still using facebook at this point is pretty much asking to be taken advantage of and abused. I rally can't feel bad for them anymore.
> the number of facebook users has been declining while the old folks staying on the platform grow ever closer to death
They don't mind; it's a targeted market fit. They have Instagram and WhatsApp for other demographics.
True, but while they're all suckers, some suckers are bigger rubes than others. The elderly are a very easy target for manipulation. I think roblox might be the only platform with less savvy prey.
> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform
Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.
no i dont
I still find it wild that Instagram does not share ad revenue with creators. Post something there that goes viral? You'll get nothing by default. (Of course, you could set up ad deals etc etc etc, if canny could could make money from it ultimately, but from all that traffic and all those ad dollars Instagram gets from it, you'll not get a cent.)
So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?
It’s crazy how these criminals can get away with it just by paying money. Sure, $25B isn’t peanuts, but this money shouldn’t have belonged to companies like Meta to begin with.
Another example why Third party Advertising needs to be banned and also put on the list of human rights by the UN.
The inbalance between good and bad consequences from third party advertising is just completely broken.
We need tort reform in the US. These nuclear verdicts are causing insurance prices to go up. I forget the statistics, but I'm pretty sure every American citizen is paying a $500 to multi-thousand dollar tax because of giant lawsuits like this. Nowhere else in the world has this problem. Lawyers have too much power with politicians.
That's because 47% of the Senate are attorneys/former practicing attorneys. Need more ex-Scientists in office. :)
No one is stopping them. There's no requirement that you be a lawyer. And lol, what a crazy idea... a lawmaker studying lawyering?! What a scam!
Just pointing out that congress has a lot of attorneys, and the OP was complaining about all the pro-attorney legislation.
Don't know why you think there's not correlation.
Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.
I support the death penalty for corporations.
I support the licensure of boards of directors and CEO types, and enforcement of laws against the people who control companies.
If the CFO commits a crime, they can't get a license anymore. Start getting the bad actors out of positions of power.
Licensing isn't the problem; simply prosecuting white collar crime is. No one wants to do it, especially the federal government, because they don't want to drive away companies to other countries.
'capitalist punishment'
We need to hold shareholders responsible for the actions of the companies they own. I get why there is a certain level of immunity, especially historically. We wanted people to be able to invest money and not have to be experts on the politics and workings of the companies they were investing in. In the modern era of having detailed information about the board members, other major shareholders, executives, shareholder reports, etc all at your finger tips, you should have to weigh how ethical and responsible a company is before investing. It needs to be "priced-in". A $25 Billion dollar judgement against Meta might hurt profits a bit, but if that $25 Billion was paid in dividend claw backs or liens against stock...
Same goes for any business venture including private equity. No more corporate veil. Every dollar or stake in ownership needs to be attributable back to an individual that can be held financially responsible. Each individual can have some amount of assets protected from claw backs, liens, judgements, etc. Enough to cover a functional used vehicle, 3 bed two bath house in their zip code, 50k in cash, and their retirement account. This gives most normal people the freedom to invest with less worry. Still, if you want to make money, it will behoove you to not take on risk by investing in organizations that flout the law, cause environmental damage, or harm others.
But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.
Change the law, it just that easy.
Yea, that's the problem here, not the (illegal) wanton abuse and manipulation of user data and privacy by Meta and other companies.
Original reward was 200+ billion, lawyered down to 25, on appeal I imagine much less. Cost of doing business for Meta and nothing changes. In cases like this, it should cost the company serious financial harm. Even $25 billion is nothing to Meta.
If Meta is able to insure themselves from the cost of their illegal business practices that, so they have no incentive not to do this, and end up costing everyone money on their insurance... yes that is a problem, not to say what meta is being punished for isn't a problem.
Surely you realise that no insurance company will continually indemnify a company which knowingly and repeatedly breaks the law, resulting in losses to the insurance company? Surely you understand that this isn't how insurance works?
Other countries don't have this problem because they enable and expect regulators to proactively enforce compliance. In the US this is largely considered anti-business, so we let companies do whatever they want and don't take action until after they do something wrong.
And breaking the law usually doesn't result in a hit to next quarter's earnings, so this is what we optimize for: kicking the can down the road until it becomes a bigger problem.
Other countries don't have this problem
Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.
Please note, those aren't my words but a response to the strongest plausible interpretation of the comment I'm responding to. (ie. it's hyperbole, meaning "the US relies heavily on torts to enforce consumer privacy compared to other countries")
Privacy law in the US is largely toothless and has vanishingly few proactive regulatory requirements. This case is a perfect example of this -- Facebook's blatant disregard for privacy wasn't what was found illegal here, it was only the fact they lied about it.
The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.
Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?
Because Meta will pay nothing and the cost of the court and legal team, will be paid for by citizens.
How exactly are you paying a "tax" because of this lawsuit?
Who predicted it would be New Mexico defending the children of the US while seemingly every other state in the country is bought and paid for by pro surveillance capitalism lobbies?
Hopefully those corrupt politicians are paying attention to the NM model and realize they can get more money by beating all the cash out of Meta like a piñata and then regulate the entire industry like casinos and tobacco, with super high taxes and exclusive for really stupid consenting adults only.
I have no idea about judicial system in New Mexico, but it's a curious state - college is free effectively for everybody in the state, for example. Also school lunches are free. It's a rare combination of poor and blue.
That amount will likely be reduced upon appeal ...
Facebook IS a steaming pile of...
and Zuck is PUBLIC ENEMY #1
There is a whole gang of public enemies in Silicon Valley.
And I hope they are afraid, and having board meetings to try to self regulate a bit to try to avoid similar pain.
I think Facebook is fine? It's where most neighborhood/city groups seem to be, and it works as expected for this. Marketplace is also pretty good, with less scams than other similar platforms.
they might be willing to hire you to help rehabilitate their image
A good start, yet still far from enough - as long as the punishments are not equal to their revenues generating by these illegal methods , big corporations will never stop exploiting society because to them those fines are just 'the cost of doing business'.
We need every state doing this, until it bankrupts them. Then the companies left will have true fear for the first time ever, and may be forced to reform or suffer the same fate.
Make an example of Meta for the ages.
> as long as the punishments are not equal to their revenues generating by these illegal methods
I would say this qualifies no?
They certainly didn't get 25 Billion in fees from Cambridge analítica. Unless they did any my conception of business is just way off.
So basically the state of New Mexico is taking $25B from Meta's market cap, therefore whomever invested in META; and where will this money go here?
I don't deny that META did something wrong, but I don't see where taking $25B and allocating it to a state's declining economy will do anything good. Put people in jail may send a better signal, but here it feels more like a heist than a punishment; and the investors will take the hit, not the company.
Hey now, this will give NM plenty of money to spend on 55 mph speed signs and Santa Fe.
Don't invest in companies that do crimes.