Meta was fined $24.7 million Wednesday after a Washington judge ruled the company had deliberately violated the state’s campaign finance disclosure laws hundreds of times. The massive penalty issued to Facebook’s parent company by King County Superior Court Judge Douglass North is the largest campaign finance-related fine ever issued in the U.S., according to Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson. Each violation of the state’s Fair Campaign Practices Act carries a $30,000 penalty, and Meta was ruled to have made 822 violations. The law requires campaign advertisers and platforms like Meta—which host political ads—to “make information about Washington political ads that run on their platforms available for public inspection in a timely manner,” Ferguson’s office said. It added that, after suing Meta in 2018 for failing to maintain the required information, the state attorney general sued again in 2020 after “Meta continued to run Washington political ads without maintaining the required information.”
