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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 .
> 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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
$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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
74 comments:
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?
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
It's not a jury verdict. Crazy how much that needs to be repeated in this thread.
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.
No one reads the article anymore. They're just vibe commenting.
Presumably it’s also easier to influence judges than random jurors.
"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.
They got an outlandish $25B in their local kangaroo court. It'll be appealed and hopefully reduced.
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?
Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?
Q3 earnings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187025
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...
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.
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-...
They were originally sued for, what, half a trillion?
Pennies on the dollar.
Not enough.
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.
> 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.
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?
They will likely not even have to pay $25B bc they will continue to appeal till they get a more favorable ruling
> 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?
New Mexico DOJ release: https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of...
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.
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.
>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."
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
Diseconomies of scale.
The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.
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.
If they actually pay $25B, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I might even eat two of my hats
So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?
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.
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.)
> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform
Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.
no i dont
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.
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.
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?
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.
Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.
I support the death penalty for corporations.
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.
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'
But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.
Change the law, it just that easy.
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?
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.
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.