They've been pushing it for ages, especially the "ID yourself for adult content" laws.

It's partly to indeed combat the AI/machine noise of the internet, but also to improve their own dataset of people. What kind of porn you watch. What kind of "adult" products you buy (soon to include knives, kitchen and garden tools, etc., because "blade"), they want to know EVERYTHING.

Not just so your ads can be targeted, but because these companies want to replace governments, and that data will be extremely useful to push people into specific roles.

Oh, you're a rebellious anarchist? Well enjoy the shitty life or we tell people about your kinks - and I 100% guarantee there will be fabricated ones too. Everyone has secrets, and these companies want to learn them all to have absolute control over you.

There are many reasons for that.

Meta wants to choose which regulations are applied to all social media platforms because they know which regulations they and their competition can/not easily comply with. They want to make themselves look trustworthy for regulating themselves, while mitigating AI scrapers and fake accounts throwing off their engagement metrics, while giving themselves very lax regulations, while also weaponizing our government to apply burdensome regulations to their competitors.

From my understanding, only federal criminal charges (and convictions) can be pardoned anyway, whereas I believe this is a state civil case (a lawsuit).

At this junction in time that could be the worst possible solution. Giving instant access to the widest cross section of the planet via the information in WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram, and the entirety of Facebook right now is the con wet dream.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certain they already have all that information on those sites. Every DM, deleted and disappearing message. The damage is done by poisoning those wells even further than they are.

Normally I'd agree, but if one of the more populated states fined meta at this rate it'd be a corporate death penalty

For context - New Mexico has a population of 2,124,222, making it the 36th most populated state in the country.

That's under 1% of the country. California has 39,355,309... No company currently in existence could survive a 4 trillion dollar fine

This is huge.. if it goes through

Hopefully they aren’t given 10 years to pay it off like the recent $18B fine for harming children.

"Could" is doing the heavy lifting.

100mil over 10 years and stop paying after 1 year.

.... for like, at least a week.

How much you want to bet they paid off the administration secretly for that help? There is no doubt.

That’ll show them!

This is New Mexico, a US state. Even so, Trump will prob still tariff them.

Today: Zuckerberg whispers in Trump's ear. Tomorrow: Trump announces trade tariffs on (New)Mexico and (says it's because Trump declared they're now part of)Venezuela.

People always upvote some form of this comment on every post that contains potential good news. Sometimes y'all need to keep your pessimism to your fucking self. It's exhausting.

Funny you mention that, oil companies at least typically pay the first payment or two on fines then stop paying and the feds let it slide. Or in shitholy states like ND they get the state courts to lower the fines to nothing after attention has died down.