[HN Gopher] Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally viola...
___________________________________________________________________
Judge rules Facebook parent Meta intentionally violated campaign
finance laws
Author : rntn
Score : 295 points
Date : 2022-09-06 18:08 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atg.wa.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atg.wa.gov)
| _appub wrote:
| adamsb6 wrote:
| Maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought Facebook's solution to
| the Washington law was to no longer run political ads in
| Washington.
|
| Testing this out right now, from my home in Washington, if I try
| to create an ad and mark it as political, I'm told I need to get
| authorized to be able to run such an ad.
| loeg wrote:
| It seems like FB failed to successfully prevent people running
| political ads in Washington, because on encountering the
| roadblock you identified, the ad customers just unchecked the
| "this is a political ad" checkbox.
| oofbey wrote:
| The fact that this constitutes a serious attempt to block
| political ads is laughable.
| loeg wrote:
| I think you could argue it was not a serious attempt.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I would be surprised if they come up with much more than "Search
| the couch cushions" money from Meta, and, if they do, the Devil
| will be wearing ear muffs, before they see any of it.
| tinktank wrote:
| This company really is a complete and utter dumpster fire.
| Koshkin wrote:
| I don't know about that. The firm I work at constantly loses
| talent to it.
| oofbey wrote:
| Often (in this case) burning trash in dumpsters is highly
| profitable, so they can pay people enough to plug their noses
| and look the other way.
| sofixa wrote:
| Honestly I'm surprised how can they still find enough morally
| bankrupt people to work for them. The pay might be good, but
| it's not like anyone working there couldn't find a similarly
| well paid job at a similar company.
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Maybe time to rethink the way fines are determined. I'd be very
| much in favour of the "swiss model" for traffic fines - based on
| your income. You did X wrong, here's the set price from our
| catalogue vs. you did X wrong and based on your earnings, here's
| what you owe.
| endisneigh wrote:
| How much money does meta even make from political ads? Why would
| they even want to deal with this?
| elliekelly wrote:
| For a company whose bread & butter is "outrage" I would imagine
| political ads of the type you're likely to see on Facebook in
| 2022 are like having someone else do your work for you. _And_
| they get paid for the privilege to boot!
| anigbrowl wrote:
| idk about Meta specifically, but each election cycle is worth a
| couple billion $ in online ad revenue alone.
|
| https://www.opensecrets.org/online-ads
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I wonder if Meta ever ran its own political ads, without a
| specific candidate paying for them. That might be one reason to
| obscure the advertiser. (I mean, they _definitely_ did this
| with generic "get out and vote" advertising, but of course
| that's not overtly favoring one candidate or the other.)
| diab0lic wrote:
| It could be favoring one over the other if they biased to
| display to specific demographics.
| lozenge wrote:
| Zuckerberg has so much money, it would be cheaper and less
| risky to just pay somebody to pay somebody to pay somebody to
| fund a PAC with offshore accounts with hidden ownership.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Just open a movie studio, money laundering problem solved!
| christkv wrote:
| Depends if it's geographically targeted to favor your choice
| political candidate. Say only run get out the vote for people
| that are likely to vote for candidate A over B
| AzzieElbab wrote:
| I do not think it is about that. Chan-Zuckerberg initiative
| donated about half a billion to finance elections
| infrastructure in 2020. It may be about power but certainly not
| about money
| colinmhayes wrote:
| My old coworkers had a story about this. Back in 2012 the
| romney campaign was spending so much money on facebook ads they
| couldn't be served fast enough. Coworker was told to turn off
| the "don't show me ads like this again" functionality for
| Romney so they could get more views. I don't have numbers, but
| it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally run
| out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > it's hard to fathom how difficult it would be to literally
| run out of people to advertise to at facebooks scale.f
|
| Probably because they were doing hyperspecific targeting, not
| because FB literally didn't have any more users to serve ads.
|
| I doubt political ads are a major part of the mix - for one,
| there is little evidence that they are all that effective
| compared to TV ads.
| lozenge wrote:
| We are talking about a campaign spending almost $20 billion
| a month, admittedly Facebook ads would only be a part of
| that, but why is it unrealistic that they ran out of ad
| spots to buy?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't know where you're getting your numbers from but
| they are definitely not correct (worked in campaign
| finance tech for a bit).
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| I could see $20 million a month, but billion doesn't work
| here since the Romney campaign didn't spend even one
| billion[0].
|
| Is this one of those weird "billion means something
| different in my country" things? Because even then, the
| miscommunication is usually between billion (10^9 in most
| English) and trillion (10^12), in short scale[1].
|
| [0]:
| https://www.fec.gov/data/candidate/P80003353/?tab=summary
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
| dwighttk wrote:
| Bloomberg spent enough money to give every US citizen $1000000
| on his last presidential run!
|
| (Not really... there were just some newscasters that were
| really bad at math)
|
| But he did spend like $1B as just one candidate in the
| primaries.
| ejb999 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krHkjdnniDE
|
| is what you are referring to.
| giantg2 wrote:
| We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for all
| candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for PACs
| etc. The spending is so wasteful. If they care so much about
| the problems they're campaigning on, they could use the money
| to work on fixing them.
| sofixa wrote:
| > We need an Ammendment to provide a common media/site for
| all candidates, with caps on outside advertising, even for
| PACs
|
| The fact that this isn't already the case is so weird.
| Probably due to the age of the constitution and legal
| system, its deification and the generic allergy to any
| evolution on that front.
|
| Campaign regulations, including fairness in representation
| and budget limits are necessary for a healthy democracy,
| otherwise it's too susceptible to influence by rich people.
|
| For instance, in Bulgaria that's taken to a somewhat
| extreme point - party/coalition lists running for election
| (it's a parliamentary democracy) get a fixed budget from
| the country if they fit the requirements (enough
| candidates, enough signatures) with a maximum allowance for
| donations and own funds to be used. Ads can't be just an
| attack on a rival, and have to include disclaimers who
| they're for, who they're paid for, and that buying and
| selling votes is a crime (an issue in Bulgarian elections,
| sadly). The system isn't perfect but IMHO it'd be far worse
| without those protections.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It once again makes me wonder what they want to do with all
| that money. Meta is one of the most powerful companies. They
| get all this money to sell some of that money.
|
| What really is the end game here? The whole point of money or
| power would be to use it to do something you care about? What
| use is money and power for the sake of itself? Why have it if
| all you want is more of it?
|
| At least some rich people seem to want to do _something_ with
| their riches and power. Which makes the rest of them even more
| of an enigma.
| jboynyc wrote:
| Perhaps a Walter White quote is fitting here: "I'm in the
| empire business."
| zeruch wrote:
| That's likely as accurate as one could be here.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Political influence is about power, not money. Money is only
| one proxy for power.
| pevey wrote:
| The short answer is, a lot of money. Like, a lot a lot. See a
| recent article from the New York Times.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/03/us/politics/senate-republ...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The low tens of millions on digital ads across all senate
| campaigns. That is definitely not _a lot a lot_.
| pevey wrote:
| This is but one example of one PAC for one party. I don't
| know how many PACs exist, but easily hundreds. Thousands? A
| lot of money is donated to campaigns and PACs across local,
| state, and national elections, and a lot of that money is
| spent on advertising of some form, and a lot of that (as
| the article describes) has been shifted to digital. I would
| call it a lot a lot.
| axismundi wrote:
| Shouldn't they rather be banned from running political ads for
| repeatedly breaking the law?
| jaywalk wrote:
| This is about as blatant as it gets. They were sued in 2018,
| lost, and agreed to make changes. They changed nothing, got sued
| again in 2020, and have now lost again. They deserve the max
| penalty.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| What, in your view, is "the max penalty" for this situation?
| bialpio wrote:
| "Under state law, the court can assess a civil penalty of up
| to $10,000 per violation. In addition, because Meta's
| violations are found to have been intentional, the court may
| triple the amount of the judgment as punitive damages."
|
| Link to highlight: https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-
| releases/ag-ferguson-judge-...
| riskable wrote:
| Additionally the judge should bar Facebook from displaying
| political ads. That would be far more punishment (and better
| for society I think) than a mere few hundred million fine.
| kennend3 wrote:
| This!
|
| Fines are often considered "the cost of doing business"
| these days. We need to revisit the system and take new
| approaches, like what you propose.
| plazmatic wrote:
| numair wrote:
| That company, which I know a _lot_ better than 99% of those who
| will comment here, was _always_ a political influence operation
| masquerading as a tech company trying to "connect the world."
| Remember, people used to describe Zuckerberg as a "young Caesar"
| (or was it Alexander?) as some sort of a compliment.
|
| Modi, Bolsonaro... It's not just American politics that's touched
| by these people.
|
| There is a lot more that can and should be said about this topic,
| that will come to light in the coming months and years. If you
| work at Meta, you _will_ have to question what you did for a
| paycheck. And you might not be able to live with the answers. The
| Amazon rainforest is on fire because of you...
| nickff wrote:
| You say you know Facebook _"... a lot better than 99% of those
| who will comment..."_ , could you be a little more specific as
| to how/what you know? Are you talking about being personally
| acquainted with executives, privy to internal communications,
| or familiar with the code base?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| You're making two relatively-unrelated claims. One, that
| Facebook--a wildly profitable publicly-traded company--is run
| as a political machine. Two, that its employees bear moral
| culpability.
|
| The first claim is extraordinary. Is Facebook's leadership
| powerful? Of course. Do they have undue influence in the U.S.?
| Probably not. If anything, their government affairs unit is
| laughably incapable of keeping its client from being a
| perennial political punching bag.
|
| The second claim has more substance. It's becoming increasingly
| common, at least in regulatory and political circles, to hear
| calls for holding individual employees responsible for
| Facebook's actions.
| trasz wrote:
| >Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not.
|
| Facebook can arbitrarily decide what millions of people will
| see. And no reason not to use it whenever convenient.
| mszcz wrote:
| > If anything, their government affairs unit is laughably
| incapable of keeping its client from being a perennial
| political punching bag.
|
| To be honest I'm pretty sure they are perfectly ok being a
| political punching bag as long as that's where it ends and
| no-one does anything substantial to them... Sadly, I don't
| recall them really getting their teeth kicked in for anything
| they did wrong.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| This guy has a decade plus vendetta against Facebook [0] and
| posts in all these threads. While I respect that, I wouldn't
| read too much into this comment.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3029872
| Koshkin wrote:
| Yet, "this guy"'s comment was an interesting read, while
| yours was not.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| "I have a lot of info on this and more will come out in the
| coming weeks and months" is no more interesting to me than
| a typical 4chan larp post.
| 93po wrote:
| Having a strong opinion you're willing to advocate for
| doesn't make the opinion any less valid in my book
| throwayyy479087 wrote:
| Quite the opposite
| softfalcon wrote:
| I read the comment you linked. They seem to be eloquent and
| have good reason to dislike Facebook. Other commenters seem
| to agree with their views as well.
|
| I'm not sure what your intention is here, but this makes it
| feel like you're taking a stance FOR Facebook/Meta and trying
| to discount numair's feelings about FB which seem valid.
|
| This reads like a bot/paid commenter trying to de-legitimize
| real and honest discussion about the topic at hand.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| I just noticed his username because I've seen it so often
| in these threads about Facebook. And it seems dishonest for
| him to level accusations while carefully wording his
| comment to sound like an insider.
|
| I posted the link for context. FWIW I agree with him on
| most points, and I've just sent traffic to his 10 year old
| post disparaging Facebook, so if I'm a paid shill I'm
| pretty bad at it.
| pvg wrote:
| _Please don 't post insinuations about astroturfing,
| shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It
| degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're
| worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll
| look at the data._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Pointing out a decade long track record of being right is a
| strange way of trying to discredit somebody.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Bahaha. This is an excellent take.
| TechBro8615 wrote:
| Posting a comment deliberately constructed to sound like an
| insider revealing information is dishonest. And I even
| agree with him. I just thought his speculation needed some
| context.
| reidjs wrote:
| If more people do what he's doing (rally against evil corps)
| the world might be a better place
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's funny that so much ire is directed at tech companies
| when I think there are a number of other companies that
| could be critiqued for much worse behavior.
| int_19h wrote:
| Here, at least, most of us are in the tech industry, so
| ire directed at tech companies is us collectively trying
| to get our house in order first.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Whataboutism, other companies are criticized just as much
| or even more than FB. One can care about multiple things
| at the same time.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| Ah yes, the _" but we're not Exxon"_ defense. You know
| things are bad when you have to stoop this low.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Exxon? I think any company that employs a size-able
| number of service workers is almost certainly doing
| things more impermissible than FB/Meta.
|
| Many of the critiques that people have of FB are just
| critiques of what happen when large groups of people
| communicate online. If that's what people have issue
| with, I wish they would flag it.
| notdarkyet wrote:
| Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean here? Possibly some
| examples?
| 93po wrote:
| It pretty clearly means that Facebook makes conscious
| decisions on how to weight what is displayed to users with
| the intention of politically influencing millions of people.
| Examples are probably difficult unless there's source code
| available from different eras of Facebook with a strict chain
| of custody, which obviously won't happen.
| dang wrote:
| Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? You've
| been doing it repeatedly lately, and flamewars are what we're
| trying to avoid here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| sam_goody wrote:
| dang, you are awesome, and I appreciate your efforts at
| keeping 4chan and Reddit away...
|
| but IMHO his comment is not really flaming, especially as it
| wasn't a combative response.
|
| [A quick look at his other comments implies he is not a
| troll, though a bit pessimistic.]
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I wish to read such posts. OP's comments are often
| tendentious but also generally substantive. Given a history
| of FB being criticized for the ethics of political
| advertising both domestically and internationally, the
| criticism seems on point to me.
| pvg wrote:
| There's nothing substantive about telling everyone how much
| better informed you are followed by unsubstantiated dark
| mutterings about how every time someone uses FB, a little
| squirrel in the Amazon loses its home. There are lots of
| better places to find an unlimited supply of this stuff
| than HN, if you're into it.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I'm sure you understand the meaning of 'generally', and I
| note you're only addressing one part of the post in
| question while ignoring the broader point - one which you
| may not agree with, but which view is as valid as your
| own.
| pvg wrote:
| What part of the post am I not addressing? It's basically
| all generic bombast and invective. You can't really post
| generic bombast and invective on HN, even if some people
| like your generic bombast and invective because it's
| generic bombast and invective. I'm sure I'm not telling
| you anything you don't know about a forum we've both been
| on for about 83771 million years.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| There is a world of difference between "posting flamewar
| comments" and pointing out the problems associated with
| Facebook's massive political influence campaigning.
| dang wrote:
| Sure, but they can overlap and it's the flamewar bits that
| we don't want here.
| [deleted]
| colechristensen wrote:
| With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares? They say Meta did
| hundreds of them... so a few million dollars. What's that, two
| engineer years?
| whiteboardr wrote:
| Maybe time to rethink the way fines are determined.
|
| I'd be very much in favour of the "swiss model" for traffic
| fines - based on your income.
|
| You did X wrong, here's the set price from our catalogue vs.
| you did X wrong and based on your earnings, here's what you
| owe.
| sixothree wrote:
| I spent some time in traffic court and it was clear how
| punitive fines are for lower income.
| hinkley wrote:
| That may go some way to handle the perverse incentives as
| well.
|
| If I do something very illegal to double my revenue, I've
| also doubled my fines.
| jboynyc wrote:
| Fines for GDPR violations work that way too. A severe
| violation can be penalized with "a fine of up to EUR20
| million, or 4% of the firm's worldwide annual revenue from
| the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher."
| https://gdpr.eu/fines/
| whiteboardr wrote:
| "up to" is the problem at hands here.
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _With a fine per violation of $10,000 who cares?_
|
| The AG identified 782 violations and requested treble damages
| [1]. That's $23mm right there, not including the state's legal
| costs (which are also trebled).
|
| [1]
| https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMSJ.PDF
| ska wrote:
| Setting fines like this can always have an incentive problem
| (see also extraction companies with "oops, I shouldn't have
| mined/cute/whatever there").
|
| I've always wondered if a sensible structure could be made to
| ensure that the fine is at minimum a few multiples of the
| possible benefit to the company. With advertising this is
| harder than say, falling trees.
|
| e.g. we estimate your company generate revenues of X from
| this activity, so we set the fine at 10X. If you disagree
| with X, you can prove it with detailed, audited statements,
| and we will take 10 times that amount if we are convinced.
| codefreeordie wrote:
| If ignoring the law costs only $23mm every two-year election
| cycle, Facebook probably figures that ignoring the law is
| worthwhile.
| munk-a wrote:
| To actually impact Facebook and spur positive change they'll
| need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps this is out of
| the domain of what courts can reasonably enforce and we need
| the legislature to take action.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _they 'll need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps
| this is out of the domain of what courts can reasonably
| enforce and we need the legislature to take action_
|
| Washington requested and received injunctive relief [1].
| Next steps would involve documented ongoing willful
| violation, getting a contempt of court ruling and then
| getting nasty with Facebook's assets and employees.
|
| [1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMS
| J.PDF
| bogwog wrote:
| If a single executive goes to prison for something like
| this, even just for a few months, it will drastically
| reduce the willingness to break the law from these
| companies no matter how huge they are.
| ulrashida wrote:
| My thoughts exactly. Meta appears to be willing to throw
| any amount of cash at a problem -- how many executives
| are willing to be put in jail for the same goal? May be
| time to strengthen the underlying legislation to include
| criminal charges for repeat-repeat offenders at scale.
| jsmith45 wrote:
| Or my view:
|
| Allow courts to "fire"[1] high level managers and
| executives who either can be proven to have actual
| knowledge, or who _should have known_ by nature of their
| position that the crimes were occurring, and who failed
| to take appropriate steps to try and prevent this from
| continuing to occur[1].
|
| This would only apply for significant enough crimes, and
| only if the criminal nature of the action is clearly
| obvious (This is not some gray area where people could
| reasonably believe the actions are legal, even if it
| turns out not to be), or when person in question was
| clearly on notice that the actions are illegal such as
| from previous fines or similar enforcement action.
|
| This has benefits over criminally prosecuting the people,
| since it allows ousting a person for severe incompetence
| in preventing crimes, even if the incompetence does not
| rise to the level of being criminal in itself. It is also
| better than really large fines which tend to actually
| punish the wrong people. (Big enough fines lead to
| layoffs, punishing the low level employees who may not be
| at fault. Big enough fines also tend to punish the
| shareholders, which for public companies often don't have
| anywhere near enough transparency into the workings of
| the company to know the crimes are occurring, and
| pressure the management/executives to fix things.). This
| generally makes it in management's personal best
| interests to actually investigate and stop crimes
| occurring within the company, rather than trying to brush
| it under the carpet or accepting fines as "the cost of
| doing business". After all, getting forced out of the
| company kinda hurts both their pride and their wallet.
|
| [1] This "firing" would take the form of voiding the
| employment contract, enjoining the manager or executive
| from performing managerial/executive functions, enjoining
| the company from continuing to employ the individual, or
| from paying the person anything more than for time worked
| not already paid. (Specifically no severance, no
| executing golden parachute clauses, etc.)
|
| [2] The nature of the crime, like OHSA violations might
| be pretty much impossible to completely prevent, and
| sometimes the person in question, might not have the
| authority to issue orders that could completely prevent
| the crime from continuing, but must have made reasonable
| efforts to get the person who does have the authority to
| to be aware and take actions.
| ziddoap wrote:
| $23mm to Meta is the same as a few dollars is to me. Just a
| small operating expense.
| avg_dev wrote:
| You have put a smile on my face today.
| hedgehog wrote:
| If they had to comply with local law in every area they operate
| it would be extremely complicated and expensive to manage. I
| think they fear the precedent not the dollars in this specific
| case.
|
| Edit: To be clear my opinion is that FB should be forced to
| comply, by federal action if necessary. That their business
| depends on not taking responsibility for the messages they
| choose to amplify is their problem and they should be paying
| the cost of that.
| msbarnett wrote:
| > If they had to comply with local law in every area they
| operate
|
| ...then they would be on a level playing field with everybody
| else. The alternative ("we don't care for some of these laws
| in some places we operate, so we decline to follow them") is
| what is generally referred to as a criminal enterprise.
| mszcz wrote:
| This a hundred times. Just because you're big doesn't mean
| you get to choose what laws or rules you follow. If it
| doesn't scale without rule breaking then, well, it doesn't
| scale. They have enormous resources yet bitch and moan that
| they'd have to spend some of them to follow the rules. Pff,
| I'd make a shit ton more money if I didn't pay my taxes or
| cheat people. How would that work out for me?
|
| If a 1000 (or 10k, or whatever) businesses in aggregate
| have a similar market cap and revenue to them while also
| following the rules then I fail to see how a single company
| has a problem with that. If it does then maybe splitting it
| up will make things easier...
| munk-a wrote:
| Precisely this - not everything scales gracefully to "big
| data" levels - some things require lots of customization
| and edgecases - sometimes for dumb reasons sometimes not.
| Given the effect Facebook has had on radicalization I am
| not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt here.
| colechristensen wrote:
| But it's not even that hard for large organizations to
| comply with local rules like that. They just can't be
| bothered apparently.
| hedgehog wrote:
| 100% agree.
| sophacles wrote:
| If that were true, why we do we see global oil companies,
| global retailers, global restaurant chains, or global media
| conglomerates? Do you think Walmart doesn't have to deal with
| varying employment and product laws at the country, state,
| and local level for each of its stores?
| hedgehog wrote:
| Do you think compliance in the industries you listed is not
| extremely costly? In every case you see companies doing
| what they can to shed cost and risk, local compliance being
| one of them. FB should follow the law but the government
| will have to make the cost of noncompliance higher than
| compliance for it to happen.
| _jal wrote:
| "Compliance is hard" is not an excuse accepted anywhere.
|
| But just in case you actually believe this should be
| convincing, consider how many tax jurisdictions Facebook does
| business in. Do you think they just ignore all those local
| rules?
| hedgehog wrote:
| I believe they should be forced to comply by whatever means
| we have and the liability should flow through to executives
| and senior employees.
| rvz wrote:
| 'X is hard' shouldn't be used as an accepted defense or an
| escape hatch as well either. Especially compliance.
| bombcar wrote:
| Facebook on one side "we can target your ads so specially
| that you can narrow down to a given city block" and to
| regulators "we can't narrow down closer than "United
| States" when complying with laws, sorry".
| wang_li wrote:
| > "Compliance is hard" is not an excuse accepted anywhere.
|
| Happens in government without any repercussions all the
| time. Washington state took ten years after being ordered
| by the state Supreme Court to fully fund education to
| actually do it.
| klyrs wrote:
| The law isn't written to bend its will to multinational
| corporations who are making the world's richest people yet,
| somehow, cannot afford to follow the law. Nor should it be.
| If it isn't profitable to follow the cornucopia of laws
| regarding campaign advertising, then don't serve them!
| bombcar wrote:
| From that PR it seems _partial_ compliance is what got them
| burned. They obviously knew what ads were political because they
| put _some_ information about them up, but not all.
|
| If they had simply not complied at _all_ and tried to blame their
| customers for not classifying the ads correctly, it might have
| gone a bit better in their favor.
|
| Related, it's still insane that companies can basically argue
| "this ad that thousands upon thousands will see cannot be
| reviewed by hand even once because that would be too hard".
| bushbaba wrote:
| Because it is too hard while still letting the SMB market
| access to the platform.
|
| Requiring a human to review each ad increases the fixed cost of
| serving a campaign.
| ballenf wrote:
| Surely a cutoff in impression #s for hand review would be
| feasible? Even if the cutoff started absurdly high as
| logistics were ironed out. And then no cutoff for certain
| classes of ads, like political.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| They need to argue that, because otherwise it would eat into
| their bottom line to the point of unprofitability. You can't
| run a service for billions of people with less than 100k
| employees that also has an editor review everything.
| gloryjulio wrote:
| I am curious about how other similar platforms handle this
| problem (like youtube) handles this kind of problems. If
| someone could provide some insight it would be great
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| They are all the same way, maybe even worse. Google is
| notoriously allergic to having real people in any step of a
| workflow, even for paying customers. Twitter is currently
| going through its own battle with the fact that a huge
| chunk of the userbase isn't even real. Amazon product
| quality is going down due to lack of manual quality
| checking of their sellers. And so on. The culprit is always
| the same: real people don't scale to the expectations of
| shareholders, so everything gets automated, and then some
| very real people show up and exploit the system.
| pc86 wrote:
| Billions of people are not buying Facebook ads.
| giantg2 wrote:
| If it's unable to comply with the law and stay profitable,
| then maybe they should go out of business.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Or change their business model.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Yeah, I completely agree. I wasn't trying to imply that I
| condone their behavior.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| Fully agree! See also "loud pipes save lives".
| sixothree wrote:
| If they can afford to buy personal information about its
| users, they can afford basic compliance.
| dogleash wrote:
| That's a terrible argument as the thing to be reviewed
| (advertisement (not "everything")) is directly connected to a
| revenue stream and the level of time spent on reviews scales
| with the amount of income.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| "We can't follow legal requirements at this scale" isn't an
| excuse we should be accepting from companies that want to
| continue operating.
| hazeii wrote:
| How do they charge per advert? If I was paying someone
| hundreds - or thousands - of dollars, I'd certainly expect
| some degree of personal service.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| The "personal service" is that they have created an entire
| social media platform just to serve your ads.
| zh3 wrote:
| Funnily enough, I was involved in a project that did
| dynamically generated real-time adverts (specifically updating
| betting odds in real time). It crashed and burned because
| Facebook insisted every advert has to be reviewed and approved
| beforehand.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yeah I think that would only really work as an in-house
| feature.
| freeAgent wrote:
| Hard = cut into our profits.
|
| If it can't be automated, Facebook isn't interested in
| complying.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If they had simply not complied at all and tried to blame
| their customers for not classifying the ads correctly, it might
| have gone a bit better in their favor_
|
| This would have been blatant contempt of court. What they did
| was _slightly_ less blatant.
| morelisp wrote:
| > contempt of court
|
| what
| pc86 wrote:
| How so?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How so?_
|
| Facebook and Washington "entered into a stipulated judgment
| that covered Meta's violations through November 30, 2018"
| in 2018 [1]. (It required Facebook "no longer 'accept ads
| that relate to Washington's state or local elected
| officials, candidates, elections or ballot initiatives.'")
|
| Not complying at all with requests from the AG, _i.e._
| arguing they had no knowledge about the situation (versus
| that they misunderstood the rules), could thus be
| interpreted as willful violation of the judgement.
|
| [1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMS
| J.PDF _page 3_
| throwawaypppu wrote:
| They got done on not publishing data that, from my quick skim,
| would not come from human review. e.g. targeting data etc.
|
| I can only assume Meta feels the risk/costs of fines are less
| than the bennefit of not disclosing who pays them big dollars
| for targeting certain demographics. I.e not provide ammunition
| for law makers to come after them in more costly area.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is more a "they don't want the public to know" than law
| makers. If law makers want that data, they can subpoena it.
| Companies don't have any sort of privacy rights to prevent
| governments from pulling their data.
|
| What would happen if meta defied a subpoena? IDK TBH. Perhaps
| a total shutdown until they comply? IDK if a company has ever
| defied a congressional subpoena.
|
| This case was about civil liability so the rules are all a
| little different. Not giving data during discovery generally
| means adverse inferences are made by the court (IE, this data
| is so bad that we have no choice but to believe what the
| plaintiff is saying about it).
|
| Defying subpoenas, though, generally results in contempt and
| fines. For an individual, that'd mean jail time.
| TrispusAttucks wrote:
| Tangentially related: [1] Zuckerbucks topic covered by the
| Foundation for Government Accountability.
|
| [1] https://thefga.org/zuckerbucks/
| balozi wrote:
| Maybe this is simply bad law. What narrow governmental interest
| would be served by such a law? Meta should fight this based
| purely on principle.
| [deleted]
| cogman10 wrote:
| So long as the law doesn't violate constitutional or federal
| legal protections, states get to pass whatever laws they like,
| no matter how onerous. There is no "narrow governmental
| interest" test facebook can argue to eliminate a state law.
| They have to argue that somehow their federal rights have been
| violated.
|
| States rights and all.
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