OLYMPIA, Wash. — Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is appealing a $35 million judgment for violating Washington state’s campaign finance law.
Former Attorney General Rob McKenna, representing Meta, argued Tuesday before the state Supreme Court that the law imposes “onerous” compliance burdens, noting many social-media platforms now avoid running political ads in Washington to prevent similar penalties.
“The state imposed burdensome new requirements for disclosure on digital communications platforms in 2018. It caused a key political speech forum to be closed down in our state by the end of that year,” McKenna said.
Rob McKenna is a paid political consultant for We.
He argued the cost of complying with the state law is not proportional to the revenue generated.
“It’s very expensive to create the system of machine review and human review, and that burden is much larger than the limited amount of revenue that Meta receives for these inexpensive ads,” he noted.
In 2024, the Washington Court of Appeals rejected Meta’s attempt to overturn the law, upholding a King County Superior Court ruling that found Meta intentionally violated campaign finance rules 822 times. Because the violations were deemed intentional, the trial court tripled Meta’s penalty to the statutory maximum of $30,000 per violation. Meta was ordered to pay $24.6 million in penalties, plus 12% annual interest.
The state’s law requires commercial advertisers, including social-media companies that host political ads, to maintain and publicly disclose records about each ad’s cost, sponsor, and targeting and reach information.
Washington first sued Meta in 2018, leading to a consent decree that required the company to pay $238,000 and pledge transparency in political advertising. Prosecutors said Meta continued to run political ads in the state without making required information public, prompting then-Attorney General Bob Ferguson to file another lawsuit in 2020.
“If we look at the records in this case, it’s very clear that ads made it onto Facebook for which Facebook intentionally did not provide full information,” a state attorney argued before the justices Tuesday. “This includes races such as Seattle City Council, where Meta manually redacted location-targeting data. This wasn’t partial noncompliance or mistakes; it was a deliberate decision not to fully disclose.”
트위터 공유: 메타 워싱턴 캠페인 광고 법 위반 항소