Hacker News

>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.

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-...

Are you proposing that as part of this settlement, Meta should have to delete the posts and likes and facebook accounts of users in New Mexico?

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

>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...

> 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.

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

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?

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

$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.

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.)

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.

> why are ads so so sucessful on meta platform

Because you look at them. Get off their platforms.

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

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.

The penalty was not damages, it was a statutory per-count penalty. This was not a tort case at all, and tort reform has nothing to do with it.

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

Why would American taxpayers be paying more because of a settlement against a private company? Shouldn't this contribute to the tax take, causing taxpayers to pay LESS?

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

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.