Google And Facebook Need To Pay $450K For Washington State Violation

On Tuesday, Bob Ferguson, Washington state Attorney General announced that both tech giant firms, Facebook and Google have accepted a fine of $450K for failing to keep records about who was spending money on campaign ads on their platforms.

According to Ferguson, $217,000 is the amount of money that Google needs to pay while Facebook is required to pay $238,000 regarding two lawsuits that were filed in June. These two lawsuits accused the two tech firms of not abiding by the political-ad transparency law from the state.

Beth Gautier, a spokeswoman from Facebook said that the company was willing to settle the matter.

She said:

In its statement, Google said that until June the company still obeyed with the laws from the Washington state. After the state released new requirements, the company had halted accepting election-related advertising since it was incapable of following the new laws.

The company wrote:

Both tech firms still denied that they had violated the law.

The lawsuits came right after the Public Disclosure Commission from the state issues rules related to a newly-released law and passed an emergency regulation clarifying that digital ad firms like Facebook and Google need to abided by the state law. This law requires them to make sure that information related to political ads is publicly available, such as television stations as well as other media.

In a statement, Ferguson said that:

When requested by the public, commercial advertisers are required to provide information. However, according to the state, Google and Facebook rejected to provide the Stranger Newspaper the political advertising records of 2017.