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A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. A
by tmp10423288442 2mo ago
A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. And that is true, but unlike the EU, for example, New Mexico is a tiny jurisdiction. It only has a little bit more than 2 million people.
So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.
Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.
I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.
- deepsun 2mo agoI'm pretty sure Meta will drag the case in appeals for many years until the order becomes irrelevant. Cheaper than paying $942m.
- nujabe 2mo agoWhy would dragging it on make the order irrelevant?
- inigyou 2mo agoKeep dragging it until there isn't a Facebook any more for unrelated reasons
- j_maffe 2mo agoYou think they'll shutdown FB?
- inigyou 2mo agoZuck has a finite lifespan.
- bix6 2mo agoActually, it’s infinite because he’s really good at fighting now (and wears a cool chain). Kachow!
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoGod willing.
- autoexec 2mo agoWhile they wait decades for the court cases to resolve they can take the amount of money they were fined and invest it. They have so much money they wont even notice it and they'll have made a profit on the whole thing by the end of it.
- deepsun 2mo agoOne way is an appeal may cancel the order or reduce the amount.
- deepsun 2mo agoAand, Meta just announced they are going to appeal.
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agoA corporation will shift the capital loss to a tax write off like any other firm. The taxpayer just takes a dollar out of their pocket, and pays a dollar in tax revenue short fall. This fine changes nothing, punishes tax payers, and Meta will just lobby more politicians. =3
- Epa095 2mo agoYou have the right idea, but remember that tax rate is not 100%. So if a company gets a fine on X dollar, that reduces their surplus by X, and they pay e.g X*20% less in tax (if the tax rate is 20%).
- Joel_Mckay 2mo agoI am sure they will figure something out in whatever jurisdictions they find advantageous. =3
- oblio 2mo agoLOL. Yes, let's do absolutely nothing, that always works well. This fine also sets a precedent that some will follow. When New Mexico does it, ok, avoidable. If NY, California, etc start doing it, at some point there is no place left to run to. Also, what's the "=3" supposed to mean?
- whatarewegonnad 2mo agowah!
- dgellow 2mo agoIt’s a cat face emoticon
- oblio 2mo agoI have no idea what it's supposed to add to the conversation...
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- rrgok 2mo agoI don't understand the logic. If I got 1000 from a mentally challenged adult by manipulating them, do I get 200 in fine or should all 1000 get confiscated from me?
- inigyou 2mo agoHow much money did Meta get from mentally challenged adults in New Mexico?
- iwontberude 2mo ago[dead]
- panta 2mo agoI guess the question could be: "how much Meta did by directly or indirectly damaging people mental health in New Mexico?". Note that the damage could be more or less subtle: someone could have been affected in great measure and become, for instance, depressed, while someone else could have been only mildly affected and just become a doom scroller. Is there a level of reasonable damage that could be tolerated? In my personal view, no, there isn't, and in theory all the earnings deriving from that person should be confiscated (and only after that you can apply the sanction). Unfortunately this won't be practical, and the only remaining option would be to heavily regulate or ban platforms that are engineered on people psychological weaknesses, and when tolerated they should be taxed to the sky (like tobacco and alcohol, or even more)
- thibaut_barrere 2mo agoSome people tend to forget that you got to start somewhere, and a lot of huge undertakings started this way. Such as Linux ;-
- whywhywhywhy 2mo agoMust have missed the part of the linux story where a company was extorted for millions of dollars by a government.
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoShow me evidence that the fine would go down by half instead of by a factor of 10 or more.
- bryanrasmussen 2mo agothere is no evidence available on that, perhaps people should go ahead and built it, but in cases such as this if NW thinks it would get a decrease or reversal on appeal it might settle for a lesser amount. I think a 90% decrease seems way too much for anyone to agree to. Frankly if I was NM and I won that much I don't think I would agree to a 50% decrease either, 25% decrease would seem to be a reasonable offer that Meta would have to be crazy not to accept. My opinion, not a lawyer and I have been told I am too aggressive in negotiations too. on edit: part of reason why there is no evidence of that is in cases like this settlements might be secret, although with a state involved I guess it can't be, but being able to track how much fines actually decreased on appeal etc. and a typology of cases etc. would be nice to have, but also probably impossible to have.
- ubercore 2mo agoMakes me think of the DuPont settlement with Rhode Island: https://www.law.com/article/almID/900005544259/ https://www.law.com/article/almID/900005544259/ As a result, Rhode Island has some great followup and public health programs. It wasn't that much money to DuPont, but it did real good in Rhode Island, and I believe DuPont changed their legal tactics afterwards.
- ToucanLoucan 2mo agoMaybe so but DuPont continues to pollute the world even today. I'm happy this fine happened. I hope it gets enforced, though in the current political climate I too have severe doubts it will be. Even so though, and even if this lawsuit is followed by many others in many jurisdictions that are all equally successful- the dream- the people behind these decisions still leave without a hitch. As long as sociopaths can sit atop corporate entities, do horrendous shit, and then simply leave wildly rich and free, even with the corporate entity in flames, that is not justice and we'll continue getting exactly what we've gotten: an endless stream of the aforementioned sociopaths harming people at scale, for money. Not trying to be a doomer. Just trying to say when the sum total of personal consequences for these people is a lot of bad press and billions of dollars, it's an easy choice for too many.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- ubercore 2mo agoMy point was more about the positive outcomes from these kinds of fines, rather than about _forcing_ corporate behavior change. If corporations are going to act like psychopaths, let's at least make them pay a tax for it with fines like this.
- ToucanLoucan 2mo agoOh yeah for sure, I'm not suggesting the fine is bad, I'm suggesting it's insufficient. I want to "yes and" this, not replace it. Fine them, and incentivize change for them and all other businesses in the space. Fines just clearly, demonstrably don't do that. Jail time for executives would, IMO.
- amelius 2mo agoI'm hoping the wrist-slapping works in an exponential way versus number of violations.
- tristanj 2mo agoThis analysis actually understates how massive and outsized the penalties are. The court ruling only applies to children in New Mexico under age 18. New Mexico has ~450,000 people under age 18, of which roughly 140,000 are between ages 13-17 (Meta officially requires age 13+ to use their platforms). Recent Pew surveys of U.S. teens ages 13–17 show ~70% of teenagers use Instagram and ~30% use Facebook. In New Mexico, Instagram and Facebook would have ~100,000 users in the 13-17 group. That's not everyone, some underage users may lie about their age, so add in ~30,000 unauthorized users under age 13. Overall, around 130,000 people in the affected class. The judge assessed $942 million in total penalties, and dividing that $942 million across 130,000 users equals approximately $7,250 in fines per user. If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account. Which creates some bizarre incentives, minors get rewarded for signing up for the platforms that are harming them in the first place.
- LunaSea 2mo agoShouldn't you take into account all young adults that were in this age range in the last 10 or 15 years?
- tristanj 2mo agoMaybe, but in the official verdict they didn't take into account all affected children either; they only used an estimated 37,500 affected teen users to calculate the fine. Meta was fined for: - 37,500 instances of deceptive-practice violations @ $5,000 per - 37,500 instances of unconscionable-practice violations @ $5,000 per - 75,000 total violations x $5,000 = $375 million The rationale for only using 37,500 users (instead of the actual user count), and choosing $5,000 per instance (the maximum amount allowed by law) is unclear to me. The second case is even more confusing, New Mexico requested $953 million from Meta to pay for its "equitable share" of a $3.7 billion public-nuisance abatement program state experts created. A judge reduced this amount to only $567 million, determining that: 1) other platforms also share responsibility, and 2) some proposed expenses were too broad (ex: the judge denied the request for the construction of entire new hospitals and clinics as part of the program).
- shevy-java 2mo agoNo, the fine is still small and thus irrelevant. It is just the courts milking money here. IF they want to fix the behaviour of mega-corporation, there must be mandatory jail sentence. When Suckerberg goes into prison for the next 10 years, no way to weasel out, only then will we see a change in the real behaviour of these guys. So your claim that this is more than a slap of a wrist, is really not accurate here.
- bs38 2mo agoI feel the platforms just arent able to handle serious problems at these scales. Unlike banks, telcos, power grid operating at similar scales, the regulations literally took hundreds of years to develop after all kinds of fiascos. Its a lesson in scaling is not magic. Problems will scale too.
- duskdozer 2mo agoThen break them up or shut them down. They can't just continue to knowingly and intentionally induce addiction and engagement for profit and then shrug their shoulders and say "we're too big, it's too hard to stop."
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- everforward 2mo agoI don’t think any of those are nearly at the scale of Meta, at least in terms of how many people they touch. Meta allegedly has 3.6B daily active users across their products; something like 1 in 2 people globally is a daily user of one of their services. Meta is also in the business of interpersonal relationships, which is a nightmare. Banks, telcos, etc mostly deal in simple things that are complicated by doing it at enormous scale. Interpersonal relationships are complicated even at small scales, and at large scales it’s virtually impossible to predict what behaviors will emerge. They took a complicated thing and scaled it into a globally ubiquitous process, and just gave up on doing it well at some point (because they can’t, and I don’t think anyone can).
- paimapi 2mo agothis is true and the knock-on effect of this is that other states with intrepid AGs and consumer protection bureaus now have a case law example to cite in their arguments the hope is that if other AGs pursue these measures that they do their due diligence of creating a case that FB's corporate lawyers won't be able to defeat in subsequent trials. otherwise case law will ultimately let large, unaccountable corporations like Meta win-out in perpetuity so this is a great battle won but there's a long road ahead for the larger legal strategy. and I do hope it's very long - the current Supreme Court ideological makeup does not favor consumers or citizens at the moment and it'll take decades for the insidious work of the Federalist Society to be mitigated
- EmbarrassedHelp 2mo agoThe New Mexico AG behind this case is Raul Torrez. He's a fascist/authoritarian asshole who has been using this case to try and force mandatory online age verification on everyone while also banning encryption. The last thing we need is for other state AGs to try to copy him.
- prepend 2mo agoPeople can be wrong about one thing and right about other things.
- troyvit 2mo ago> Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. Do you think that now that one state has won this judgement (for now) other states could follow?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- DeusExMachina 2mo agoWhile the calculation is not wrong, there are other factors at play in Meta's decisions. First, how likely is it that similar rulings happen in other states or countries? While proportionally to the population the fine is significant, it isn't over Meta's global market. It can be only if similar fines will happen at a high enough rate. Second, what is the global cost of adapting the whole platform to the ruling? (Assuming they don't build exceptions for users in New Mexico like Apple does) Both factors have an influence, so if the fine is unlikely to be replicated, which it probably is, and the cost of adapting is exceedingly high, which certainly is, then Meta will continue their practices.
- voncheese 2mo agoI don't disagree with anything said here, but it sure would be nice if Meta (and any other companies building social media applications) focused more on what's right for children, both short and long term, than the math of what is profitable.
- troyvit 2mo agoDon't worry, DCA to the rescue! https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings
- EmbarrassedHelp 2mo agoThe problem is that "what's right for children" should be better parental controls, and better enforcement of treating self-declared ages under 18 separately. Instead, the New Mexico AG and other assholes believe it means we need more mass surveillance, mandatory age verification, bans on encryption, and other insanity.
- alex1138 2mo ago> bans on encryption It's a bit of a tangent, but Meta actually really annoys me Is the general war on encryption bad? Yeah Meta? Meta forcibly upgraded people on Messenger. Now chats are broken. First they took away your friends https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433 and then they REALLY took away your friends, by doing this They actively want to be a monopoly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198. I don't trust them with fucking anything (Messaging was already unreliable using Messenger, even for friends. Let alone people trying to reach you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712)
- theptip 2mo agoThey are investing heavily in this, FWIW. https://about.fb.com/news/2025/10/instagram-teen-accounts-13-movie-ratings/ https://about.fb.com/news/2025/10/instagram-teen-accounts-13... I guess you could still make the claim that this is just doing the math on what is profitable.
- cwmoore 2mo agoHow many Meta customers are in jail now?
- cwmoore 2mo agoScared to touch that one, it seems.