WA state files motion for maximum $24.6 million penalty against Facebook parent company Meta
Facebook parent company Meta may face a $24.6 million penalty in Washington state for intentionally violating the state’s campaign finance transparency laws 822 times.
The motion for the maximum penalty was filed by Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson according to a Friday morning news release.
“Facebook is a repeat, intentional violator of the law,” Ferguson said in the release. “It’s a sophisticated company. Instead of accepting responsibility and apologizing for its conduct, Facebook went to court to gut our campaign finance law in order to avoid accountability. If this case doesn’t warrant a maximum penalty, what does?”
Meta repeatedly violated the campaign finance law since December 2018, the state claimed. Companies such as Meta, which host political ads, and other advertisers are required by state law to provide public records about the ads they host in a “timely manner.”
King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North agreed with the state’s claims in October and ruled that all 822 violations were intentional. Courts can triple penalties for intentional violations, the release noted, and those penalties are deposited into the State Public Disclosure Transparency Account.
Meta claimed in September that the transparency laws were “too burdensome.” Judge North disagreed, and told the company that, “The only…information that has to be made available is the information that Meta is already collecting. They necessarily collect it in order to be able to run the ads that they’re running. So all they have to do in order to display it is essentially press a button.”
Meta has already been sued twice in Washington, once in 2018, and once in 2020, for not maintaining required information about hosting Washington political ads.
