To actually impact Facebook and spur positive change they'll need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps this is out of the domain of what courts can reasonably enforce and we need the legislature to take action.

If a single executive goes to prison for something like this, even just for a few months, it will drastically reduce the willingness to break the law from these companies no matter how huge they are.

Or my view:

Allow courts to "fire"[1] high level managers and executives who either can be proven to have actual knowledge, or who should have known by nature of their position that the crimes were occurring, and who failed to take appropriate steps to try and prevent this from continuing to occur[1].

This would only apply for significant enough crimes, and only if the criminal nature of the action is clearly obvious (This is not some gray area where people could reasonably believe the actions are legal, even if it turns out not to be), or when person in question was clearly on notice that the actions are illegal such as from previous fines or similar enforcement action.

This has benefits over criminally prosecuting the people, since it allows ousting a person for severe incompetence in preventing crimes, even if the incompetence does not rise to the level of being criminal in itself. It is also better than really large fines which tend to actually punish the wrong people. (Big enough fines lead to layoffs, punishing the low level employees who may not be at fault. Big enough fines also tend to punish the shareholders, which for public companies often don't have anywhere near enough transparency into the workings of the company to know the crimes are occurring, and pressure the management/executives to fix things.). This generally makes it in management's personal best interests to actually investigate and stop crimes occurring within the company, rather than trying to brush it under the carpet or accepting fines as "the cost of doing business". After all, getting forced out of the company kinda hurts both their pride and their wallet.

[1] This "firing" would take the form of voiding the employment contract, enjoining the manager or executive from performing managerial/executive functions, enjoining the company from continuing to employ the individual, or from paying the person anything more than for time worked not already paid. (Specifically no severance, no executing golden parachute clauses, etc.)

[2] The nature of the crime, like OHSA violations might be pretty much impossible to completely prevent, and sometimes the person in question, might not have the authority to issue orders that could completely prevent the crime from continuing, but must have made reasonable efforts to get the person who does have the authority to to be aware and take actions.

This would requite a major refactor of the legal system. Probably would take a couple thousand man-years to implement. Suggested workaround: just put those bastards in jail for a few days.

My thoughts exactly. Meta appears to be willing to throw any amount of cash at a problem -- how many executives are willing to be put in jail for the same goal? May be time to strengthen the underlying legislation to include criminal charges for repeat-repeat offenders at scale.

> they'll need to impose a much higher penalty - perhaps this is out of the domain of what courts can reasonably enforce and we need the legislature to take action

Washington requested and received injunctive relief [1]. Next steps would involve documented ongoing willful violation, getting a contempt of court ruling and then getting nasty with Facebook's assets and employees.

[1] https://agportal-s3bucket.s3.amazonaws.com/174_StatesMSJ.PDF

$23mm to Meta is the same as a few dollars is to me. Just a small operating expense.

Setting fines like this can always have an incentive problem (see also extraction companies with "oops, I shouldn't have mined/cute/whatever there").

I've always wondered if a sensible structure could be made to ensure that the fine is at minimum a few multiples of the possible benefit to the company. With advertising this is harder than say, falling trees.

e.g. we estimate your company generate revenues of X from this activity, so we set the fine at 10X. If you disagree with X, you can prove it with detailed, audited statements, and we will take 10 times that amount if we are convinced.

You have put a smile on my face today.