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How Many Billions Would It Take to Hold Meta Accountable?

需要多少十亿才能让 Meta 承担责任？

Save this story. Earlier this week, a New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay a $25 billion fine for violating consumer protection laws dating back to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. $25 billion is a massive fine, the largest Meta has ever faced, but it still had us folks at WIRED wondering: Would Meta even feel the pain?

保存此报道。本周早些时候，新墨西哥州的一位法官下令 Meta 支付 250 亿美元的罚款，原因是其违反了可追溯至剑桥分析公司丑闻的消费者保护法。250 亿美元是一笔巨额罚款，也是 Meta 迄今为止面临的最大罚款，但这仍然让我们《连线》（WIRED）的员工感到好奇：Meta 会感到痛吗？

A quick recap of the case: Filed in 2021, the suit alleged that the company violated the state’s Unfair Practices Act by lying to Meta users about the way it handled their data. (Later, New Mexico’s attorney general also made claims against Meta’s content moderation policies.) In September, a jury ruled in favor of the state. Then came the multibillion-dollar penalty.

案件简要回顾：该诉讼于 2021 年提起，指控该公司在处理用户数据的方式上欺骗 Meta 用户，从而违反了该州的《不公平行为法》。（后来，新墨西哥州总检察长还对 Meta 的内容审核政策提出了指控。）9 月，陪审团裁定该州胜诉。随后便出现了这笔数十亿美元的罚款。

“This ruling, and the Attorney General’s approach to enforcement, makes it all but impossible to do business in the state of New Mexico,” C.J. Mahoney, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement. “At its core, this lawsuit seeks to impose a tax on speech to enforce new rules for what people can say online. We are confident we will prevail on appeal.”

Meta 首席法务官 C.J. Mahoney 在一份声明中表示：“这一裁决以及总检察长的执法方式，使得在新墨西哥州开展业务几乎变得不可能。其核心在于，这起诉讼试图对言论征税，以强制执行关于人们可以在网上说什么的新规则。我们有信心在上诉中获胜。”

Meta’s legal troubles have proliferated so much this year that it’s hard to keep track of them. Earlier this year in New Mexico, a jury ruled that the social media company should pay $375 million for violating the state’s Unfair Practices Act. That trial was related to child safety. A second phase of the case resulted in Meta being ordered to pay $567 million.

Meta 今年的法律麻烦层出不穷，以至于难以追踪。今年早些时候，新墨西哥州的一个陪审团裁定，这家社交媒体公司因违反该州的《不公平行为法》应支付 3.75 亿美元。那次审判与儿童安全有关。该案的第二阶段导致 Meta 被判支付 5.67 亿美元。

Meanwhile, a Los Angeles County superior court found Meta—and Google-owned YouTube—liable for harming a user’s mental health with the addictive design features of their apps. The plaintiff, a young woman, was awarded $6 million; Meta is on the hook for the bulk of that payment. Then in August, Meta settled a landmark federal case brought against the company by the majority of US states. This suit, once again, centered on addictive features in its apps that were alleged to be harmful to kids. As part of that settlement, Meta will pay the states between $17 and $18 billion over 10 years.

与此同时，洛杉矶县高等法院裁定，Meta 和谷歌旗下的 YouTube 因其应用程序中令人上瘾的设计功能损害了用户的心理健康而需承担责任。原告是一名年轻女性，获赔 600 万美元；Meta 需承担这笔赔偿金的大部分。随后在 8 月，Meta 与美国大多数州就针对该公司提起的里程碑式联邦诉讼达成和解。这起诉讼再次聚焦于其应用程序中被指对儿童有害的成瘾功能。作为和解协议的一部分，Meta 将在 10 年内向各州支付 170 亿至 180 亿美元。

Added up, that’s a lot of billions. And yet: It’s still just the cost of doing business for Meta. Reuters reports that in the most recent New Mexico trial, the state’s attorneys originally asked Judge Francis Mathew to award the state between $35 and $45 billion. That would’ve been significant for the state, but would that extra $20 billion have kneecapped Meta? Nope.

加起来，这是很大一笔钱。然而，对于 Meta 来说，这仍然只是经营成本。路透社报道称，在最近的新墨西哥州审判中，该州律师最初要求弗朗西斯·马修法官判给该州 350 亿至 450 亿美元。这对该州来说意义重大，但这额外的 200 亿美元会击垮 Meta 吗？不会。

Even if Meta was forced to pay the total maximum fine of the New Mexico ruling—a whopping $219 billion, or $5,000 across 43 million violations, reduced by the judge to $25 billion—the company would have felt only a mild sting. As of writing, Meta is worth around $1.7 trillion. Its stock took a hit on Thursday, but that was due to a confluence of factors, like Meta’s earnings report on Wednesday, the company’s massive capital expenditures on AI, and AI stocks dragging overall.

即使 Meta 被迫支付新墨西哥州裁决的最高罚款总额——高达 2190 亿美元，即 4300 万次违规行为每次罚款 5000 美元，尽管法官将其减至 250 亿美元——该公司也只会感到轻微的刺痛。截至撰稿时，Meta 的市值约为 1.7 万亿美元。其股价周四受到冲击，但这归因于多种因素的共同作用，例如 Meta 周三的财报、该公司在人工智能方面的大规模资本支出，以及人工智能股票整体表现疲软。

At this point, with no immediate monetary damage to Meta, it would take an accumulation of events to force some kind of change, legal experts tell me. For one, Meta has a clear perception problem: Juries are ruling against it, protesters have railed against it, even its own employees have been more vocal about the company’s internal policies.

法律专家告诉我，目前由于 Meta 没有受到直接的经济损害，需要一系列事件的积累才能迫使公司做出某种改变。首先，Meta 存在明显的认知问题：陪审团做出不利于它的裁决，抗议者对其进行抨击，甚至连它自己的员工也开始更多地公开谈论公司的内部政策。

Every time Meta doesn’t settle a case, the evidence presented during trial can be scrutinized by the public and used in future cases against Meta, says Corban Rhodes, partner at DiCello Levitt, the outside law firm representing New Mexico in this case. “This trial included more than 100 exhibits that we were able to put into public record, things that had been kept secret for more than a decade since Cambridge Analytica,” Rhodes told WIRED.

代表新墨西哥州处理此案的外部律师事务所 DiCello Levitt 的合伙人科尔班·罗兹（Corban Rhodes）表示，每当 Meta 不选择和解时，审判中提交的证据就会受到公众的审查，并可能在未来针对 Meta 的案件中使用。“这次审判包括了 100 多份我们能够公开记录的证据，这些证据自剑桥分析公司丑闻以来已经保密了十多年，”罗兹告诉《连线》。

One such item is a 2018 email that then COO Sheryl Sandberg sent to a few colleagues days after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. Sandberg wrote, “The single biggest issue we face—and I really need everyone to know this—is that there were a MILLION developers with access to the data. We are going to have many, many, many more moments like this in the next month and year.”

其中一项证据是时任首席运营官雪莉·桑德伯格（Sheryl Sandberg）在剑桥分析公司丑闻爆发几天后发给几位同事的一封 2018 年的电子邮件。桑德伯格写道：“我们面临的最大问题——我真的需要每个人都知道这一点——是有 100 万开发者可以访问这些数据。在接下来的一个月和一年里，我们将会有很多、很多、很多这样的时刻。”

There are early signals that private insurers may start balking at having to cover the cost of a tech company’s legal defenses. Some experts are suggesting that insurance companies could even end up being de facto governance for AI, as they “inject responsibility into how AI is designed, developed, and deployed as a condition for obtaining insurance.” Meta learned this firsthand in March, when a Delaware judge ruled that insurers do not have a duty to defend Meta against the literal thousands of lawsuits being brought against it.

有早期迹象表明，私人保险公司可能开始拒绝承担科技公司的法律辩护费用。一些专家建议，保险公司甚至可能最终成为人工智能的事实上的监管者，因为它们将“把责任注入到人工智能的设计、开发和部署方式中，作为获得保险的条件”。Meta 在 3 月份亲身体验到了这一点，当时特拉华州的一位法官裁定，保险公司没有义务为 Meta 辩护以应对针对其提起的数千起诉讼。

There’s no well-defined number at which Meta suddenly becomes vulnerable—the company is unlikely to ever fold from legal penalties alone. But problems could crop up if shareholders or board members stop seeing the company as some inanimate entity and start to focus on the individual directors or officers who have been making bad decisions, says Brian Quinn, a law professor at Boston College Law School who studies corporate law, M&A, and transaction law. Like, say, the people who keep appearing in lawsuits.

波士顿学院法学院研究公司法、并购和交易法的法学教授布莱恩·奎因（Brian Quinn）表示，没有一个明确的数字能让 Meta 突然变得脆弱——该公司不太可能仅仅因为法律处罚而倒闭。但如果股东或董事会成员不再将公司视为某种无生命的实体，而是开始关注那些做出错误决策的个人董事或高管，问题就可能出现。比如，那些不断出现在诉讼中的人。

“The way that indemnification law is written right now, the fact that a person in a company was found to have violated a law doesn’t necessarily make them liable. It can be believed that they were acting in good faith, or in the best interest of their company,” Quinn says. “But problems start to arise if shareholders say, wait a minute, there’s not only evidence that this director or operator is violating the law, but it has appeared in the same set of facts seven times now.”

“按照目前的赔偿法，公司内部人员被发现违反法律并不一定意味着他们要承担责任。人们可以认为他们是出于善意，或者是为了公司的最大利益，”奎因说。“但如果股东们说，等一下，不仅有证据表明这位董事或运营者违反了法律，而且同样的事实已经出现了七次，问题就开始出现了。”

After a huge accumulation of these kinds of results, Quinn says, some angry shareholders might stand up and say the corporation should no longer be able to indemnify those directors. That’s when you might see change, because Meta’s executives would no longer be as protected. Finally, since litigation is often behind the curve on society-disrupting technology, Meta’s legal woes are likely far from over—especially as it wades deeper into AI.

奎因说，在积累了大量此类结果后，一些愤怒的股东可能会站出来，要求公司不再能够赔偿这些董事。那时你可能会看到变化，因为 Meta 的高管将不再受到同样的保护。最后，由于诉讼在颠覆性技术方面往往滞后，Meta 的法律困境很可能远未结束——尤其是随着它在人工智能领域越陷越深。