Facebook didn’t follow Washington Election Transparency Laws, but a lawsuit challenging the company’s role in political campaigning in the United States

Each violation of the law is typically punishable by up to $10,000, but penalties can be tripled if a judge finds them to be intentional. North fined Meta $30,000 for each of its 822 violations — about $24.7 million. Ferguson stated that the fine was the largest campaign finance related penalty ever issued in the US.

Washington’s transparency law requires ad sellers such as Meta to keep and make public the names and addresses of those who buy political ads, the target of the ads, how they are paid for and the total number of views of the ads. Ad sellers must provide the information to anyone who asks for it. Television stations and newspapers obeyed the law for a long time.

Ferguson said he had one word for the conduct of Facebook. It did not follow Washington’s election transparency laws. But it wasn’t enough. Facebook argued in court that those laws should be declared unconstitutional. That’s amazing. Where is the company’s responsibility?

Facebook and Meta: A Social Media Embedding Platform for the Trump Exit from the EU and its Campaign to Get Out of the European Union

“Meta was aware that its announced ‘ban’ would not stop all advertising from continuing to be shown on its platform, and so it did,” North wrote last month.

Meta, one of the world’s richest companies, reported quarterly earnings Wednesday of $4.4 billion, or $1.64 per share, on revenue of nearly $28 billion, in the three month period that ended Sept. 30.

The amount of the recovery is very striking, given that Facebook argued that its users consented to the practices at issue, according to the plaintiffs’ lawyers.

Users consented to the practices and no actual damages were suffered by Meta. The company has changed its approach to privacy after Dina El-Kassaby said that the settlement was in the best interest of its community and shareholders.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers said about 250 million to 280 million people may be eligible for payments as part of the class action settlement. The amount of the individual payments will depend on the number of people who come forward with valid claims.

Whistleblower Christopher Wylie then exposed the firm for its role in Brexit in 2019. He said Cambridge Analytica was successful in convincing British voters to support the exit of the European Union. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was the vice president and U.S. hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer owned much of the firm at the time.

According to a source close to the Trump campaign’s data operations, Cambridge Analytica staffers did not use psychological profiling for his campaign but rather focused on more basic goals, like increasing online fundraising and reaching out to undecided voters.