Meta ordered to pay $25B penalty in New Mexico Cambridge Analytica case

Posted by cbg0 17 hours ago

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https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of...

Comments

Comment by stillpointlab 14 hours ago

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

Comment by alex1138 11 hours ago

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

Comment by iamflimflam1 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by busyant 1 hour ago

I was deposed once.

It was 6 hours where the opposing counsel tried to rattle me / get under my skin with insulting questions.

To be clear, I was only an expert witness in the lawsuit (drug + pregnant lady + birth defects). It paid extremely well, but was something I would never want to do routinely.

At the end of the deposition, the lawyer had to catch a flight to the west coast and she asked ME if I would drive her to the airport* (she said she'd pay me my hourly rate)!

At that point it was clear that the insults were just theater and "part of the job", but I took it all too personally and told her I had to get home.

* She was late for the flight and Uber wasn't a thing yet.

Comment by watwut 41 minutes ago

Theater insults are as much insults as any other. In the context of law process, even worst I would say.

Comment by expedition32 49 minutes ago

I don't think you can be a lawyer if you take cases personally. At some point you have to defend a rapist who is clearly guilty.

Comment by tsunamifury 7 hours ago

Why doesn’t your lawyer just say “asked and answered”

Comment by pier25 10 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by literallyroy 10 hours ago

Thank you for the links! The snarky gotcha-style questions is surprisingly humanizing for the person being deposed.

Comment by alex1138 9 hours ago

It's a deposition

Comment by 12 hours ago

Comment by bananamogul 16 hours ago

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).

Comment by paxy 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by wavemode 6 hours ago

$25B is the reduced judgment. The state was originally awarded over $200B.

Comment by gruez 16 hours ago

>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.

Comment by whycome 16 hours ago

That’s all framing. If they use the win for their reelection campaign…they just won’t mention the appeals process.

Comment by freejazz 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by gruez 15 hours ago

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...

Comment by freejazz 14 hours ago

It's not a jury verdict, and I am a lawyer...

Also, a paper from RAND from 1987? Are you for real?

Comment by zamadatix 12 hours ago

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!

Comment by aprilthird2021 15 hours ago

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

Comment by freejazz 14 hours ago

It's not a jury verdict. Crazy how much that needs to be repeated in this thread.

Comment by loeg 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by cwnyth 13 hours ago

No one reads the article anymore. They're just vibe commenting.

Comment by throwaway894345 15 hours ago

Presumably it’s also easier to influence judges than random jurors.

Comment by spiderice 9 hours ago

"gets" is certainly a word choice. There is about a 0% chance NM get's anywhere near $25 billion

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 13 hours ago

"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.

Comment by loeg 13 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by dam_jackalopes 12 hours ago

What makes it outlandish?

Comment by xp84 11 hours ago

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/

Comment by chmod775 9 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by xp84 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by chmod775 6 hours ago

I'm trying to puzzle together the belief system that makes your comment coherent.

You seem to assume that money being transferred from Meta's into New Mexico state coffers is worse than burning it. Also did the people of New Mexico not elect their government?

Additionally, what instance of "giving people cancer" is not being pursued because resources were allocated to this instead?

Finally, fines must be high enough to have the intended effect of deterrence. If only absurdly high fines work, which appears to be the case in Meta's instance, then absurdly high they must be. If they continue that pattern of behavior while ignoring every fine, then the only alternatives would be either shutting Meta down for being a criminal enterprise and putting people behind bars, or throwing the idea of "rule of law" out the window. A high fine is doing them a favor.

Comment by johnisgood 2 hours ago

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Comment by trismus 2 hours ago

Or that other companies were not adequately fined

Comment by ozgrakkurt 4 hours ago

Yeah because government steals two breads from you if you get caught stealing a bread

Comment by dam_jackalopes 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by xp84 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by shevy-java 2 hours ago

I don't see how math applies here with regards to "per resident". Why would it matter how many residents are? What matters is how much wealth a company has in proportion.

If you fine a billionaire with a two dollars fine, this will have ... what impact exactly?

Comment by shevy-java 2 hours ago

"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."

No, that's wrong. Fines are also in proportion to how much wealth the company has. You totally did not mention this in your post - I wonder why.

Comment by senordevnyc 11 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by paxy 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by dam_jackalopes 10 hours ago

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?

Comment by paxy 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by dam_jackalopes 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago

>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

Comment by eks391 9 hours ago

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...

Comment by loeg 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by philipallstar 1 hour ago

I've never understood why Meta is being pursued over this and not Cambridge Analytica. I thought CA were the ones misusing the app system.

Comment by andy_ppp 20 minutes ago

There are I imagine laws about protecting your customers data and not allowing apps and plugins to for example steal every connection people have on the platform. CA were not "hacking" Facebook they were using the platform as is and if that allowed these types of abuses why not.

Comment by nakak 10 minutes ago

Not only that, this also marked the end of open APIs for social networking websites. Something that has been a constant complaint in this website for 10 years now.

Let's not forget Facebook didn't do anything wrong - the only data that CA received was data that was marked as public by the profiles.

Comment by heaney-555 6 minutes ago

It's not about the facts. It's about political posturing and emotional sophistry.

Comment by spectre9 50 minutes ago

It’s precedent that you can just file anything against meta and win 25bn dollars.

Comment by notfried 13 hours ago

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...

Comment by eks391 9 hours ago

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...

Comment by giancarlostoro 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by alex1138 14 hours ago

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

Comment by 10111001 13 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by nfw2 5 hours ago

I agree with the rest of this super well-informed thread that we need to remove corporate limited liability so we can send executives who break the law like SBF and Elizabeth Holmes to prison. It's so wrong that we can't send these people to prison when they break the law!

Comment by heaney-555 21 minutes ago

What law do you believe Meta broke?

Comment by paxy 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by victorbuilds 4 hours ago

$25B penalty that’s like a month of their revenue. This is like me paying a month’s salary as penalty - it’s not pleasant but it would definitely not impact my life style.

Comment by binarymax 14 hours ago

12% of annual revenue (~200B for 2025). Not a small amount.

Comment by loeg 13 hours ago

~50% of 2018 revenue, which is when the CA scandal was happening.

Comment by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe 3 hours ago

But they grew much bigger still thanks to illegal tacticts. So the very fact that it's a sizable portion of 2018's revenue but not of today's revenue shows how incitated they are to keep going the same path.

Comment by heaney-555 6 minutes ago

What illegal tactics do you believe they used?

Comment by afdbcreid 14 hours ago

You mean 200B?

Comment by rajman187 13 hours ago

meta makes $1.4B/week in net profit, so that's about 4 months of net profits

Comment by f33d5173 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 13 hours ago

And kids got fined 1/2M for downloading a few mp3s...

Comment by binarymax 13 hours ago

lol that was a fun typo. Fixed :)

Comment by jeanloolz 14 hours ago

25B is not a small fine. Finally an amount that should make them think twice their harming decisions

Comment by OnlineTux 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by chihuahua 11 hours ago

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."

Comment by betterunix2 8 hours ago

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."

Comment by f33d5173 6 hours ago

The fine is for the state of new mexico, it's about 50 years of revenue in that state. That's decent sized imo.

Comment by mhh__ 11 hours ago

Too large, if I may say such a thing.

Comment by barbazoo 13 hours ago

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

Comment by dgunay 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by charcircuit 6 hours ago

>harming decisions

It's infantilizing to think it's harmful to give users control over their privacy because they are too stupid to understand what they are doing when they share their data with someone that it shares their personal data with someone.

Comment by rvz 14 hours ago

They don't care.

Meta can take the hit by either selling stock, laying of more employees or both to cover that cost.

Comment by idlewords 14 hours ago

Or they can put thick mitts on Zuckerberg's hands for a couple of years so he can't sign any checks.

Comment by hawk_ 14 hours ago

Stock seems to have shot up ~7% aftermarket so just cost of business.

Comment by minraws 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by dntrkv 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by cush 13 hours ago

Their users are ad execs and data brokers

Comment by Forgeties79 14 hours ago

Hell didn’t they stop even reporting DAU’s?

Comment by minraws 13 hours ago

they now do something called, Meta Family daily active people, similar thing but aggregate of all Meta stuff. very sus imho.

Comment by Forgeties79 9 hours ago

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

Comment by lrvick 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by kube-system 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by lrvick 13 hours ago

True. But seeing them lose an arm would be proof the monster can be killed.

Comment by kube-system 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by lrvick 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by kube-system 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by lrvick 6 hours ago

> but still 2/3 of internet users are not using one -- about 4 billion people.

It takes a couple decades for mindsets to get updated without major forcing functions like global pandemics or industrial revolutions. Those forcing functions in software are ramping up fast though. But consider how many in China use a VPN vs US. Try to censor and you only teach subversion.

> free hosting for expensive-to-host content.

It is not free. It is paid for in attention and changes to human behavior with highly targeted advertising and engagement farming children.

It is a net negative on society and we must kill it.

Free is when millions of people all agree to share their excess bandwidth to share files freely with each other on bittorrent. Works pretty well at scale.

We never needed surveillance capitalism to share videos. That was always a con.

Make UX on decentralized video sharing look like youtube and when censorship or ads on Youtube pass a tipping point people will just start ripping youtube videos and torrenting them a lot more than they are now. Or decentralized microtransaction services like LBRY mature.

> they'd just force users to use a trusted client

Then I rip all the content and share it peer to peer with a user friendly interface.

Comment by paxy 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by techjamie 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by reasonableklout 13 hours ago

Other countries also have a concept of the corporate death penalty. But it has not happened in the US for something like a century.

Comment by Aurornis 14 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by bilekas 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by zuminator 11 hours ago

This is incredibly almost $12,000 per New Mexican resident. I wonder how much they will actually pocket after attorney's fees and appeals?

Comment by loeg 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by zuminator 7 hours ago

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...

Comment by rickdeckard 3 hours ago

Ah, so again a solution was found which continues to allow future crimes to be planned like a business case with basic cost/benefit math.

Why wasn't this prosecuted with jail-sentences like Dieselgate?

Comment by lasky 6 hours ago

Looks like Zuck having a HARD time taking accountability for any of the eventual social _consequences_ of his social _network_ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7UC2ie0XIE

Comment by lasky 5 hours ago

best quote by Sheryl Sandberg:

"[FB] is given data by it's users, rather than us collecting it."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1j4N-3ZkB4&t=262s

Comment by akulbe 14 hours ago

That's just New Mexico. I wonder when will the other states step up, and hit them with more fines?

Comment by Carson_Cummins 11 hours ago

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)

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by verdverm 9 hours ago

he already said they need to change their name to New America, surprising no one

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 3 hours ago

Wouldnt that offend all the other red states feel that were not renamed ?

Comment by ArcHound 15 hours ago

This seems to be a consequence of the Cambridge Analytica. Could it be that we'll see some consequences?

Comment by j_horvat 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by tyrabound 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by wnevets 9 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by attila-lendvai 3 hours ago

why would they? they are on the same team.

the corporation legal framework is the very means of ruling. its entire point is to crack a covert fault line into the idea that everyone is equal in front of the law.

Comment by nfw2 8 hours ago

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

Comment by omgwtfbyobbq 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by nfw2 7 hours ago

any organization of people does that lol

Comment by Eridanus2 5 hours ago

You are correct. You are also in violation of HN guidelines pertaining to eschewing personal swipes.

The ground reality clearly demonstrates the asymmetry between a 'naked' operator and the one cocooned inside a corporation. The criminal law is identical for both in spirit, in practice; corporations often protect their executives by simply buying out the courtroom: bench, bar and gavel.

Comment by nfw2 3 hours ago

You are in violation of the hacker news rules but making a swipe at me implying I am a rule breaker. Please change your comment to be a more neutral tone or I will report it.

Comment by Frieren 5 hours ago

> not operators

You need a government willing to apply the law. Republicans are lawless criminals. They only put political rivals in prison whenever guilty or not.

The current reality is that laws do not apply to CEOs of big tech companies. It must be solved. They should be send to prison, and no pardons. When criminals are protected by the government all society suffers.

Comment by nfw2 3 hours ago

The attacks were against limited liability for corporations, now you are changing the subject.

Comment by isolay 5 hours ago

What planet do you live on?

Comment by nfw2 3 hours ago

Hey Eridanus2 you've got another violator to scold!

Comment by JumpCrisscross 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by layer8 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by willy_k 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by mordae 3 hours ago

I would dissolve Facebook over blatant intentional breach of law. Better than sending people to jail. Just imagine. One day the FB homepage saying "log in to download all your data, you have 14 days -- gov agency".

And then wipe everything, sell servers on ebay, pay employees couple months of wages as apology, pay off lenders, strike the company off the business register and bye.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by RHSeeger 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago

> if you cause harm to 40 million people, you should be held accountable

Yes.

> it should be treated as a crime

Crime means jail. Not just for the folks you want in jails. For anyone who the people with power drive should be in one.

Comment by anonymous908213 11 hours ago

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?

Comment by JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by 10 hours ago

Comment by throwaway81523 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by lovich 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by DannyBee 3 hours ago

"Sure, but we can still all be pissed about the upper class being beyond consequences that us plebs get."

HN is mostly the 1%, they just don't think they are the 1%. At least in the US. Outside the US it's often even more crazy, but it's more bi-modal.

In the US, grossing 500k all-in (IE stock + bonus + salary, not take home pay) would put you in the top 1%.

225k all-in would put you in the top 5%.

Watching HN complain about "the upper class" or "the rich" is an exercise in cognitive dissonance.

Comment by llama052 2 hours ago

I guess I’m not getting paid enough these days…

Comment by JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by imawakegnxoxo 10 hours ago

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

Comment by JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago

> don't think "holding rich people to the same standard as the peasants" is equivalent to "lowering the bar for criminality"

Neither do I. But let’s look at the facts and circumstances of this case. Lowering the threshold for criminal guilt to meet it would, I think, expose a lot of ordinary activity to criminal prosecution.

Comment by webnrrd2k 6 hours ago

Not all of them... try talking to Marie Antoinette. A lot of the nobility and church-types didn't do so hot. Wealthy urban bourgeois did pretty good, though.

Comment by lovich 10 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by nixon_why69 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by guelo 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by AngryData 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by tw04 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by nfw2 7 hours ago

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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 11 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by johnnyanmac 10 hours ago

>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.

Comment by wasfgwp 5 hours ago

So the implication is that if Madoff used an llc to perpetrate all of his scams he would have face no criminal liability? A llc doesn’t somehow magically shields executives from criminal prosecution

Comment by spiderice 9 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by hereme888 13 hours ago

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?

Comment by Maarten88 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by throwaway81523 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by infinite_spin 11 hours ago

I just want to note that the president can give pardons for federal crimes, but not for state level crimes.

Comment by Maarten88 9 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by throwaway81523 4 hours ago

Yes, you do a state prosecution even if there are already federal charges, since Trump can only pardon federal charges. Pardoning state charges, though, can be done by the state governor, same deal. So you do all 50 states to be very nearly sure.

Comment by hereme888 11 hours ago

And your source of information is internet hearsay, I gather?

Comment by Maarten88 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by shermantanktop 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by j16sdiz 10 hours ago

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....

Comment by roenxi 24 minutes ago

If you don't think the decision makers are considering the cost to the business (as represented in the fine) or the cost to themselves (as measured by a bonus) then whet do you think is motivating their decision making process?

Decision makers are often quite sensitive to the cost to the business, people who are tagged as causing $25 billion in unnecessary charges would need to start talking very quickly about what justifies the expense. Even in the case of Facebook that much money is more than enough to start swinging decisions.

Comment by betterunix2 8 hours ago

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?

Comment by betterunix2 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by Zigurd 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 10 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by Zigurd 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by mbesto 9 hours ago

> 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

Comment by wasfgwp 5 hours ago

Because the market believes that the fine will be massively reduced after an appeal. That’s what usually happens..

Comment by NegativeLatency 6 hours ago

It is, but as they say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander", if we have rules they should apply to everyone equally, or they should be changed.

Comment by JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago

> if we have rules they should apply to everyone equally, or they should be changed

This is tautology, but sure. If you or I did 10x this, e.g. stole a car via financial slipper, we would not be prosecuted.

Comment by xigoi 5 hours ago

Even if you stole 43 million cars?

Comment by betterunix2 9 hours ago

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?

Comment by mywittyname 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by gottorf 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by betterunix2 8 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by gottorf 8 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by betterunix2 7 hours ago

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.)

Comment by johnnyanmac 10 hours ago

>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...

Comment by gottorf 8 hours ago

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!

Comment by hsuduebc2 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by roosterIllusi0n 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by joquarky 12 hours ago

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?

Comment by tt24 8 hours ago

Sorry, who claims this? Sounds like you’re confused

Comment by hsuduebc2 12 hours ago

Big risk of being fired maybe while receiving humongous payoff. Ridiculous.

Comment by suburban_strike 12 hours ago

Golden parachutes mitigate those risks. The company may tank, but they get theirs.

Comment by 59percentmore 12 hours ago

Hold them in jail pending trial. They are the definition of flight risk.

Comment by mxkopy 13 hours ago

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

Comment by tt24 8 hours ago

Deranged statement here

Comment by cromka 12 hours ago

>> 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.

Comment by noobrtoobr 12 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by s5300 10 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by mordae 3 hours ago

Or such companies could be dissolved for breaching law in a sufficiently big way. And I mean dissolved. Not sold. Not split. All its accounts are frozen, all its physical assets are sold in an auction. Proceedings going to pay everyone in the company 3 months worth of their wage capped at 3x median wage of the country as they are fired, rest goes to state. All imaginary property enters public domain immediately. Patents are cancelled. Done.

"But it would be tremendous loss if we cancelled [bigco]!"

Well, maybe, let that be a lesson the all other such companies and their owners I guess?

Comment by penguin_booze 4 hours ago

They're busy taking risks and breaking things. They can't waste their valuable time in jails and stuff like that, sir.

Jails are for losers -- not Peter Thiel.

Comment by lrvick 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by jorisboris 5 hours ago

There’s an interesting case around this with the Taranto steel plant. This plant was heavily polluted. Italy has criminal liability for executives for ecological violations. The owners went to jail and the government asked Arcelor-Mittal to come in and clean the mess. Arcelor-Mittal received a shield from the government for the criminal liability. The next populist government withdrew the shield. Arcelor pulled out. Now the government is managing a steel plant while looking for a buyer.

Broadening criminal liability for executives might sound like a good idea but there are a lot of second order effects

Comment by derekdahmer 13 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by iririririr 12 hours ago

LOL. had a good laugh. thanks

Comment by cush 13 hours ago

If only software engineers were liable like real engineers are

Comment by lrvick 13 hours ago

"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.

Comment by linkregister 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by portmanteur 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by linkregister 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by joebig 4 hours ago

Reg. 2: What is the time window within which they need to secure the said contract once laid-off, failing which they'll be required to leave the country?

Comment by shimman 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by barbazoo 13 hours ago

Why would you personally punish the chumps that execute the orders instead of leadership that gave the orders?

Comment by theendisney 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by suburban_strike 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by spencerflem 11 hours ago

Ok sure, not in the eyes of the law. But ethically

Comment by willio58 12 hours ago

It’s needs to be punishment all the way from the top to the bottom

Comment by shimman 9 hours ago

"I was just following orders" has never been a valid excuse for anything, continue using it at your own peril.

Comment by iririririr 12 hours ago

that's how you build a case against the ring leader

Comment by gosub100 13 hours ago

Why punish the leadership? they were just following their "fiduciary duty to shareholders" to maximize value.

Comment by wavefunction 13 hours ago

Punish everyone, you may be unjust but at least you'll be thorough.

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 13 hours ago

"Real" engineers aren't responsible for their product being used in nefarious ways as long as the product was built according to the rules.

Comment by johnnyanmac 9 hours ago

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.

Comment by elric 3 hours ago

At least in Volkswagen's "dieselgate", executives got prison sentences. No clue whether they ever served them, but still.

Comment by fugalfervor 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by eddieroger 8 hours ago

Fines are just permits for companies that can afford it.

Comment by wasfgwp 5 hours ago

25 billion is huge, though. If the market believed that Meta would ever have to pay the full fine (unfortunately highly unlikely) its stock would be doing a lot worse.

Comment by giancarlostoro 11 hours ago

Idk if Mark really is an android as they suggest, how do you jail a robot?

Comment by prokopton 8 hours ago

I want a new season of Oz starring Zuck.

Comment by Jackie360 9 hours ago

Just takes one line to change a civil law into a criminal one, “and shall serve a term of imprisonment of not less than . . .”

Comment by seizethecheese 13 hours ago

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?

Comment by theendisney 12 hours ago

We imprison or fine to motivate others not to do the same. I doubt the current treatment is potent enough.

Comment by verdverm 9 hours ago

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

Comment by dzonga 11 hours ago

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.

Comment by chilmers 10 hours ago

Unless you're Sam Bankman-Fried, Bernie Madoff, Elizabeth Holmes, Allen Stanford, Raj Rajaratnam, Michael Milken...

Comment by lenerdenator 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by nradov 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by lenerdenator 12 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by nradov 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by lenerdenator 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by nfw2 5 hours ago

I agree, every shareholder who owns Meta stock should be financially and criminally liable for these crimes! Especially your grandma, she could have invested that 401k in more ethical ways

Comment by nfw2 7 hours ago

Anyone who performs criminal actions while working at a corporation may be charged with criminal charges

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 13 hours ago

Executives cant goto jail, they are already taking responsibilty.

Comment by NuclearPM 13 hours ago

I don’t understand your comment.

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 7 hours ago

Im making fun of the double speak used by the media when they use the word responsibility following the company doing something wrong.

Comment by vjvjvjvjghv 13 hours ago

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

Comment by yodsanklai 13 hours ago

Any reason why META surged after hours? is that related to this news?

Comment by loeg 13 hours ago

Q3 earnings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50187025

Comment by burnto 8 hours ago

> “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.

Comment by elmer2 13 hours ago

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?

Comment by mrtesthah 12 hours ago

>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?

Comment by nidnogg 14 hours ago

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...

Comment by ram1500natrluvr 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by culi 14 hours ago

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-...

Comment by deepsun 8 hours ago

They will appeal, as usual, and never pay that.

Comment by ctrlaltdileep 10 hours ago

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.

Comment by cm2012 9 hours ago

This will be successfully appealed. It is an outrageous verdict for something with zero actual harms.

Comment by vvpan 13 hours ago

I rarely cry but my eyes just got wet. It feels so good.

Comment by system2 4 hours ago

This is not a slap but a lick on the wrist.

Comment by usefulcat 14 hours ago

Can they appeal it?

Comment by loeg 13 hours ago

> 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.”

Comment by mike_bob 16 hours ago

Not enough.

Comment by vincnetas 1 hour ago

Will/Can Trump just pardon meta for 1M$?

Comment by ThouYS 14 hours ago

finally some proper penalty OOMs

Comment by idlewords 14 hours ago

That penalty is almost 1/3 of a Metaverse. That's got to sting!

Comment by MASNeo 14 hours ago

Will Meta be able to apeal?

Comment by lysace 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by gsky 15 hours ago

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

Comment by throwaway894345 15 hours ago

Other countries fine American companies all the time.

Comment by lenerdenator 13 hours ago

They were originally sued for, what, half a trillion?

Pennies on the dollar.

Comment by sciencesama 12 hours ago

cost of doing business

Comment by ChrisArchitect 14 hours ago

New Mexico DOJ release: https://nmdoj.gov/press-release/the-new-mexico-department-of...

Comment by gib444 14 hours ago

If they actually pay $25B, I'll eat my hat. Hell, I might even eat two of my hats

Comment by tomjen3 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by schwarzrules 15 hours ago

$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.

Comment by paxy 9 hours ago

How much is a bankrupt non-existent company going to pay? You tell me..

Comment by ReptileMan 15 hours ago

Diseconomies of scale.

Comment by shevy-java 2 hours ago

In my opinion, companies who incur such a high penalty, also need to put the corresponding CEOs in jail for some time. It can not be that they cause so much damage to society, but the CEOs constantly escape due punishment. This is unfair - every small criminal stealing a purse, typically gets put in jail (perhaps not on first offence, but we know how severe the punishments are on repeated offences). People who cause so much damage to society, also need to be penalised appropriately with jail time. But in a land that does not want to find out how deep the Epstein network really was, anything goes. The big TechBros get protected by the law; the fine here is just peanuts for the awful Facebok empire.

Comment by richwater 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by advisedwang 15 hours ago

The article says this was a statutory $5k per infringement * 43M counts, then reduced by the court. This was not a jury award.

Comment by freejazz 15 hours ago

They are also not punitive damages, and Meta was also found to be willful.

Comment by devsda 15 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by xyzzy123 13 hours ago

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?

Comment by devsda 8 hours ago

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.

Comment by Der_Einzige 8 hours ago

That would unironically dramatically improve the world. Knock out Florida and Texas next please!

Comment by aprilthird2021 15 hours ago

They will likely not even have to pay $25B bc they will continue to appeal till they get a more favorable ruling

Comment by warkdarrior 13 hours ago

> 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?

Comment by devsda 8 hours ago

If the data was not "stolen", then asking them to delete is also not "recovery".

Comment by ok123456 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by gruez 16 hours ago

>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...

Comment by ok123456 14 hours ago

Yes? They used Facebook APIs in conjunction with their own data points. This is basically all of "ad tech."

Comment by whycome 16 hours ago

Ad campaign? We are lucky they didn’t make the settlement in “Meta Quest Cash” or “Ad Buy Credit”

Comment by ok123456 14 hours ago

They absolutely tried at one point or another.

Comment by donchuru 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by DrMandalay 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by aprilthird2021 15 hours ago

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?

Comment by hmokiguess 14 hours ago

Pay to play

Comment by Devasta 14 hours ago

Anything less than a jail cell is less than the top brass of Meta deserve.

Comment by Noaidi 16 hours ago

The original fine was much higher. This is closer to Meta’s hopes than the peoples.

Comment by SecretDreams 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by warkdarrior 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by georgestones 13 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by dominotw 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by autoexec 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by kps 14 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by autoexec 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by mrwh 14 hours ago

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.)

Comment by SoftTalker 15 hours ago

> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform

Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.

Comment by dominotw 14 hours ago

no i dont

Comment by alex1138 16 hours ago

So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?

Comment by nalekberov 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by google234123 17 hours ago

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.

Comment by JohnMakin 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by nfw2 3 hours ago

$25 billion is not nothing to Meta or to anybody

Comment by newsclues 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by WheatMillington 15 hours ago

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?

Comment by nfw2 3 hours ago

Will any insurance company bail you out of a 25 billion dollar fine even once?

Comment by KZerda 16 hours ago

Or Meta could not break the law. It's just that easy.

Comment by mingus88 16 hours ago

I support the death penalty for corporations.

Comment by cookingmyserver 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by newsclues 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by JasserInicide 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by ludicrousdispla 16 hours ago

'capitalist punishment'

Comment by newsclues 16 hours ago

But tort law makes it easy and profitable for them to do so.

Change the law, it just that easy.

Comment by advisedwang 15 hours ago

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.

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by WheatMillington 15 hours ago

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?

Comment by MiroslavPokorny 7 hours ago

Because Meta will pay nothing and the cost of the court and legal team, will be paid for by citizens.

Comment by paxy 9 hours ago

How exactly are you paying a "tax" because of this lawsuit?

Comment by taude 16 hours ago

That's because 47% of the Senate are attorneys/former practicing attorneys. Need more ex-Scientists in office. :)

Comment by freejazz 15 hours ago

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!

Comment by taude 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by kube-system 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by reaperducer 16 hours ago

Other countries don't have this problem

Guess how we know you've never lived, worked, or read a newspaper in any other country.

Comment by kube-system 16 hours ago

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.

Comment by lrvick 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by vvpan 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by DivingForGold 14 hours ago

That amount will likely be reduced upon appeal ...

Facebook IS a steaming pile of...

and Zuck is PUBLIC ENEMY #1

Comment by timpera 13 hours ago

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.

Comment by fugalfervor 8 hours ago

they might be willing to hire you to help rehabilitate their image

Comment by vvpan 13 hours ago

There is a whole gang of public enemies in Silicon Valley.

Comment by lrvick 13 hours ago

And I hope they are afraid, and having board meetings to try to self regulate a bit to try to avoid similar pain.

Comment by mentalgear 14 hours ago

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'.

Comment by bilekas 14 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by lrvick 14 hours ago

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.

Comment by natas 12 hours ago

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.

Comment by The_President 9 hours ago

Hey now, this will give NM plenty of money to spend on 55 mph speed signs and Santa Fe.

Comment by fugalfervor 8 hours ago

Don't invest in companies that do crimes.