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".
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I am curious about how other similar platforms handle this problem (like youtube) handles this kind of problems. If someone could provide some insight it would be great
They are all the same way, maybe even worse. Google is notoriously allergic to having real people in any step of a workflow, even for paying customers. Twitter is currently going through its own battle with the fact that a huge chunk of the userbase isn't even real. Amazon product quality is going down due to lack of manual quality checking of their sellers. And so on. The culprit is always the same: real people don't scale to the expectations of shareholders, so everything gets automated, and then some very real people show up and exploit the system.
You: "If they complied with the law, then they wouldn't be profitable."
It seems your conclusion is, "Therefore they should be above the law."
No, that isn't how it works. They *must* comply with the law, and if they cannot be profitable when they are not a criminal entity, then they should go out of business.
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.
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.
I've set up an automatic reply email to Facebook recruiters telling them in detail why I'm not interested in doing "the most meaningful work of my career" for them.
Although, come to think, I haven't heard from them in a while.
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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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].
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.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
> 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.
My hope would be that we have an intelligent society that can easily see through the mistakes. There are so many mistakes and half truths on the news that it's almost not worth following. I view everything they say with some level of skepticism.
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
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
This would requite a major refactor of the legal system. Probably would take a couple thousand man-years to implement. Suggested workaround: just put those bastards in jail for a few days.
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.
> 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.
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.
Fines for GDPR violations work that way too. A severe violation can be penalized with "a fine of up to €20 million, or 4% of the firm’s worldwide annual revenue from the preceding financial year, whichever amount is higher." https://gdpr.eu/fines/
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.
> 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.
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...
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.
"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?
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".
> "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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, I do agree the “insider” take did come across as unnecessary to make their points and does seem odd.
Also, a HN mod requested I didn’t make the comments I did about you. Seems like a valid rule and my comment didn’t really add to the discussion, so sorry about that as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Arguing that FB's primary reason for being is as a political influence operation rather than providing network effects to its users. I don't agree with your characterization of the comment. No doubt our interpretations will continue to differ.
My characterization of the comment is entirely orthogonal to any underlying truth it may be referring to - it's a trash comment. Yelling 'you're fat!' at an overweight person is a trash comment even if you somehow happen to believe it's also public health advocacy.
There is a world of difference between "posting flamewar comments" and pointing out the problems associated with Facebook's massive political influence campaigning.
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.
> 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.
> Do they have undue influence in the U.S.? Probably not.
Banning the former President, having affiliations with political agencies, getting people to change political opinions with targeted advertising, experimenting brain control through algorithms... Are you sure?
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.
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.
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".