Meta: the company that owns Facebook, was fined nearly $25 million by a judge in Washington state on Wednesday for repeatedly and knowingly breaking a law about campaign finance disclosure. This is thought to be the largest campaign finance fine in U.S. history. Judge Douglass North of the King County Superior Court gave the highest possible fine for more than 800 violations of Washington’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, which was passed by voters in 1972 and later made stronger by the Legislature.
Bob Ferguson, who is the attorney general of Washington, said that the maximum was fair because his office had already sued Facebook in 2018 for breaking the same law. Meta, which is based in Menlo Park, California, did not answer an email asking for comment right away. Washington’s transparency law says that ad sellers like Meta must keep and share the names and addresses of people who buy political ads, as well as the ads’ targets, how they were paid for, and the total number of times each ad was seen.
Anyone who asks for the information must get it from the people who sell the ads. The law has been followed by TV stations and newspapers for a long time. But Meta has fought against the rules many times, arguing in court without success that the law is unconstitutional because it “unduly burdens political speech” and is “almost impossible to fully comply with.”
Facebook argued in court that those laws should be thrown out
Facebook does keep a record of political ads that run on the site, but the record doesn’t include all the information that Washington’s law requires. Ferguson said in a news release, “I have one word to describe Facebook’s behavior in this case: arrogance.” It did not care about Washington’s laws about how elections are run. That wasn’t enough, though. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be thrown out because they don’t follow the Constitution. Where’s the company’s sense of duty?’ In 2018, after Ferguson’s first lawsuit, Facebook agreed to pay $238,000 and promised to be more open about how political ads and campaign money are spent.
Each law break can usually get you up to $10,000
Then said that it wouldn’t sell political ads in the state because it didn’t want to follow the rules. Still, the company kept selling political ads, and in 2020, Ferguson sued them again. “Meta knew that its announced ban would not stop all of this kind of advertising from being shown on its platform”, “and it did not,” North wrote last month that Meta’s violations were deliberate.
Each law break can usually get you up to $10,000 in fines, but if a judge thinks it was done on purpose, the fines can be tripled. North gave Meta a fine of $30,000 for each of its 822 offenses, which came to about $24.7 million. Ferguson said that the fine was the biggest fine related to campaign finance ever given in the U.S. “Meta is one of the richest companies in the world”. On Wednesday, the company announced that it made $4.4 billion, or $1.64 per share, in the three months that ended on September 30.
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