Good! Remember though, fines don’t count anymore, only hard time. Remove some years from these fuckers lives and they’ll think twice in the future.
Facebook made 200 billion in revenue in 2025.
https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/meta/revenue/
They were fined $375 million. They averaged $550 million per day last year.
Unfortunately, part of the court’s decision was that Facebook wasn’t surveilling people enough.
The New Mexico court heard how Meta’s 2023 decision to encrypt Facebook Messenger – its direct messaging platform, which predators have used as a tool to groom minors and exchange child abuse imagery – blocked access to crucial evidence of these crimes.
Yes. My take is that meta and others want this lawsuit to happen this way because they can use it as an excuse for age verification and other tracking things going on ATM too. The fine is nothing to them, but this is justification require more user identification
“The design feature changes the state is seeking include “enacting effective age verification, removing predators from the platform, and protecting minors from encrypted communications that shield bad actors”.”
Oh fuck right off.
I’m sorry but this is a bad “think of the children” decision. There are limits to what Meta or any platform can do about bad actors at that size without structural changes.
What might actually help: only show people content from groups and people that they follow, preferably in chronological order, rather than suggesting new groups and pages algorithmically all the time and thereby increasing the likelihood of children interacting with strangers on the Internet.
And improve parental controls for children’s accounts. I’m sure there’s nothing currently giving a “parent” account high level control over a “child” account, but I’m happy to be corrected if I’m wrong.
But also: require intercompatibility with other platforms and a standardized form of profile data export so people can leave Facebook but stay in touch with the people who still use it.
Putting this in fixed-width for scale:
This ruling: 375,000,000 Meta valuation: 1,618,000,000,000This isn’t even a slap on the wrist; it’s a fucking rounding error.
Phrased in another way, it’s equivalent to if you had $1,618 in the bank and were fined $0.30.
Super small compared to their income, but a GREAT reason to make all the users age validate.