[autoexec]

Oh yeah, big tech is going to be shaking in their boots. I'm sure Meta is really crying about the 1.4 billion they lost while they're rolling around in the 134 billion in revenue they made last year. They've even got a nice easy payment plan which allows them to invest and make money on the $225 million they're going to be paying each year from 2025 to 2028.

[toomuchtodo]

Policy and progress takes time, but does happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/07/30/seante-...

[autoexec]

We need protections in law, but I can't say I'm a big fan of KOSA. It not only fails to address the problem for anyone other than children, but it enables a lot of harm. Censorship isn't the solution. Ending the buying and selling of personal data, outlawing ads that are targeted to individuals as opposed to targeting content/context, and requiring companies to apply the same policies and prices for all of their customers no matter who that customer is, or how much money that customer has in the bank would be a better approach.

[toomuchtodo]

Sometimes censorship is the solution, because humans are tricky and every human comes with their own baggage. Not always of course, but there is always nuance.

[xkcd1963]

We are not always going forward..

[mulmen]

Revenue isn’t profit. This is gradeschool finance. Meta’s net income in 2023 was $39 billion. $1.4 billion is 3.5% of worldwide income for one US state. It’s an unsustainable penalty for Meta if more states and jurisdictions issue similar penalties.

[autoexec]

> Revenue isn’t profit.

No, and I didn't say that it was. Reported revenue was just the data Meta has made available. Unless I've missed it somewhere, they don't explicitly state exactly how much profit they made last year. I think it's reasonable to assume that it was several times more than the 1.4 billion dollar fine though, which is really the point. If Meta/facebook makes even just tens of billions in profit, 1.4 billion could easily be a sustainable penalty. The more years they are hit with a fine that size, and the more other states start demanding their cut of the action too, the less sustainable it becomes, probably, but for all we know paying this 1.4 billion fine (over several years) to Texas could actually be (or end up being) profitable for meta.

How much money did they make off the data they've been collecting and abusing since 2011? How much money will they make in the future from what they learned by abusing that facial recognition data for nearly 15 years? If it ever amounts to more than the fine, or if other incentives make it justifiable to shareholders then Meta is better off for having broken the law.

[mulmen]

> Unless I've missed it somewhere, they don't explicitly state exactly how much profit they made last year.

They state this in their financial reports and it is readily available on financial news websites. I’m not sure how you found revenue without also finding net income (aka profit).

Type “meta profit” into a search engine and click the first result. This immediately gave me the answer in Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Kagi, and Yahoo.

[autoexec]

the first result in Duckduckgo took me here (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/26/technology/meta-earnings-...) which is paywalled but what is readable gives a number for a single quarter, but not for the whole of last year.

Google takes me here (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/meta-po...) where it's the same story

You mentioned Kagi, so I thought I'd try asking kagi's AI search: "how much did Meta make in profits last year"

That gave me:

According to the available information:

In 2023, Meta Platforms reported annual revenue of $134.902 billion, which was a 15.69% increase from 2022.12 However, the information does not explicitly state Meta's profit for 2023.

The closest relevant information is that in 2022, Meta's total operating profit declined from $46.8 billion in 2021 to $28.9 billion.3 Additionally, in Q4 2023, Meta reported revenue of $40.11 billion, which was a 25% year-over-year increase.4

So while we don't have the exact profit figure for 2023, the available data suggests Meta's profits were likely substantial, though potentially lower than the previous year's $46.8 billion.3

[mulmen]

The first result for me is https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/... on all of those engines. It’s really easy to find. Any search engine should show you this in the first handful of results. Or just look it up on Yahoo finance. This is really basic stuff.

[autoexec]

I should have skipped the search engines all together and just pulled up the wikipedia article for meta. They have it listed right at the side of the page.

[Aloisius]

Profit = net income, which is in their income statement.

For FY2023, it was $39.1 billion.