Poor Meta.
Only three Washington Supreme Court justices believed the social media giant’s complaint that it’s “unduly burdened” by the state’s political campaign disclosure law.
The law requires media companies selling political advertising to disclose records of those ads when asked by a member of the public. It’s part of Washington’s long commitment to transparency around political campaigns.
Instead of complying, Meta pitched a fit, just like it did in other places when asked to comply with legal obligations facing other media companies.
Call me a hypocrite: I enjoy the company’s products but find its corporate behavior appalling.
In this case, Meta admitted it violated Washington’s law. It did so willfully and repeatedly. Then it decided to stop accepting political ads in the state so it could avoid the disclosure rules altogether.
That’s similar to its obstinance in Canada, where it opposed a law requiring it to pay for news reports adding value to its platforms. Rather than pay, it blocked news on its sites across the country.
Washington politicians still bought ads on Meta sites, though, and the company let it happen. Canadians continue posting news on Facebook despite the ban, and the company isn’t paying up.
So what should governments do about an intransigent bully?
Washington’s Attorney General sued and won a summary judgment in lower courts. That decision, and a $35 million penalty, were upheld in a ruling last Thursday by the state Supreme Court.
The majority opinion, penned by Justice G. Helen Whitener, also found that Washington’s law doesn’t infringe on Meta’s First Amendment rights.
Three justices thought the fine was too high, and three others were open to Meta’s argument that the law was burdensome and stifled speech.
The latter dissent, penned by Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud, was concerned about speech limitations in part because Meta chose to stop taking political ads in Washington. That line of thinking seems to empower a bully and reward its strategy, of deliberately stifling speech on its own, to avoid compliance.
Most of the refs saw the player was dramatically faking a free-speech injury.
I don’t pretend to know what the justices know. But a few things seem missing from their opinion.
One is an acknowledgment that other media companies, including this one, complied with the disclosure rules for years. The Attorney General noted this during oral arguments but the ruling didn’t seem to follow that up.
Washington’s other media outlets seem like a useful example. Even as their businesses were gutted by the likes of Meta, they still found time and resources to follow the law and make political-ad records available. Isn’t it suspect that only tech giants claim it’s too costly and complicated to comply?
“Unduly burdensome” is relative, I guess.
While judges were finalizing their decisions, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sailing his $300 million yacht and its $30 million tender through Puget Sound.
Maybe owners of local newspapers and TV stations would have huge boats if they flouted laws that cost them a relative pittance. A few judges might agree that the laws were overly burdensome.
Earlier during their deliberations, Meta largely abandoned its virtual-reality ambitions, the “metaverse” pipe dream that led Zuckerberg to rebrand Facebook as Meta and flush nearly $80 billion.
Yet the company would be “unduly burdened” by having to keep and disclose records of a few million dollars worth of political ads in Washington.
I appreciate that justices are so concerned about the First Amendment and careful to limit government harm to anyone before them, rich or poor.
But the leniency that dissenters sought to give Meta is astonishing.
The company shouldn’t have to pay such a big fine partly because it disclosed some, but not all, of the required information, they wrote.
They seemed to discount the transparency law’s importance, writing that the penalty should be “proportional to those violations, not to abstract concerns about election integrity.”
Perhaps those leanings are why legislators feel emboldened to disclose some, but not all, of their public records. Good enough for government work.
Also missing from the dissent is skepticism of Meta’s claims that it’s too much for the company to figure out which ads in Washington were purchased by political campaigns.
What does that say about Meta’s technology? Is it unable to cross-check with the Public Disclosure Commission’s online spreadsheet?
Months before the ruling, Zuckerberg was telling investors about Meta’s AI “superintelligence.”
On an April earnings call, he said “we’re going to be able to develop a first principles understanding of what you care about and what each piece of content in our system is about so that way we can show you more useful things for what you’re trying to accomplish.”
Yet in court, Meta “provided evidence that using machine learning — alone or with other review systems — to identify Washington political ads is not feasible,” according to the dissent.
Which story do you believe: That a $1.4 trillion company can build technology to identify “what each piece of content in our system is about” so it can show you more and target ads? Or that it’s too much of a technical and financial burden for Meta to keep records of a few thousand campaign ads in Washington, so it can promptly disclose those records if asked?
It must be one or the other.
Thank goodness the court’s majority saw through the ruse.
