Comment by WarcrimeActual
1 month ago
I haven't read this article, but I can tell you for certain that no verdict was handed down that will punish them in any way that matters. They have and generate more money than they could ever spend and they're functionally above the law because of the money and lawyers they can afford. The law itself is broken in this country and when you get big enough you can literally get away with murder.
If history is any indication, only demonstrable threat of personal erasure will affect the behavior of people on this scale.
By "erasure," I'm not referring to the death of the involved; I'm referring to the elimination of the individual's social capital.
When the privileged lose their ability to influence others, they tend to get rather distressed.
How would we do that here? Make Zuckerberg divest from FB or Meta as a whole? Would that be possible?
Honestly he was more right with the death part. The only thing these people really fear is death. Anything else is a fine and a fine means nothing when you don't feel it.
1 reply →
+1. If there's a dollar amount attached to a verdict for a company of this size, then it's just a complicated business expense and not an enforcement of a law.
they should give voting stock out as punishment.
It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.
This is really bad for Meta.
> It's a $3 million verdict in compensatory damages. Even if reduced on appeal, that's a lot of money.
Where are you seeing that?
The article says:
> Jurors found there were thousands of violations, each counting separately toward a penalty of $375 million. That’s less than one-fifth of what prosecutors were seeking.
> Meta is valued at about $1.5 trillion and the company’s stock was up 5% in early after-hours trading following the verdict, a signal that shareholders were shrugging off the news.
> Juror Linda Payton, 38, said the jury reached a compromise on the estimated number of teenagers affected by Meta’s platforms, while opting for the maximum penalty per violation. With a maximum $5,000 penalty for each violation, she said she thought each child was worth the maximum amount.
Meta has a net profit over $140 million _per day_. $3 million is absolutely nothing to them.
how many minutes of revenue is that?
they did $200 billion in revenue and $60 billion in net income last year.
a $3 billion fine would be barely more than a slap on the wrist.
Until we start to penalize companies by percentage of global revenue rather than some arbitrary dollar amount that pales in comparison to their revenues this sort of stuff is going to keep happening.
$3m is nothing. 10% of global revenues (not profits) for each year in which this occurred would be something that might actually make them think twice about breaking the law and harming people for money.
3 replies →