Meta took in $200.97 billion in revenue in 2025, which comes to about $22.9 million an hour. On June 18, the Washington Supreme Court upheld a $24.6 million penalty against Meta for breaking Washington State’s campaign disclosure law. Washington State’s Public Disclosure Commission, the agency that administers the law, believes it is the largest penalty ever imposed for campaign finance violations in the United States. At Meta’s 2025 pace, the company earned that amount in about 64 minutes.

I wanted to know what that penalty would have been under the laws other democracies use. I also wanted to know whether fines sized to the companies that break the law, and criminal charges against the executives in charge, can stop corporations from buying officials and hiding who pays for political ads. Several democracies scale the penalty to the size of the company, and Washington State sets one maximum for everyone.

Washington State voters adopted the disclosure law by initiative in 1972. The law requires businesses that sell political ads in Washington State to keep public records showing who paid for each ad and how each ad was targeted. The penalty is up to $10,000 for each violation, and a court can triple it when the violation is intentional. Bob Ferguson, then Washington State’s attorney general and now the governor, sued Facebook in 2020 and said, “Whether you’re a tech giant or a small newspaper, those who sell political ads must follow our campaign finance law.” The penalty law treats the tech giant and the small newspaper the same way, with the same maximum.

The $24.6 million penalty was Washington State’s second penalty against Meta under this law. In 2018, Eli Sanders, then associate editor of The Stranger, a Seattle alternative newspaper, hand-delivered letters to the Seattle offices of Facebook and Google. He asked for the records the law requires on ads in the 2017 city elections, and neither company produced them, according to the attorney general’s office. Ferguson sued both companies that June. That December, Facebook paid $238,000 to settle the case, a $200,000 penalty plus legal costs. Facebook then announced a policy of no longer selling political ads in Washington State. According to the 2020 lawsuit, Facebook kept selling them to at least 171 political committees for at least $525,000. King County Superior Court found 822 intentional violations of the law and tripled the penalty. Justice G. Helen Whitener wrote in the Washington Supreme Court’s lead opinion that Meta is a “willful repeat offender with vast resources.”

The European Union sets the penalty for the same kind of failure by the size of the company. Under the Digital Services Act, the European Commission, the European Union’s executive body, can fine a large online platform up to 6% of global annual revenue. For Meta’s 2025 revenue, that comes to about $12 billion. The commission issued its first fine under that law on Dec. 5, 2025: €120 million against X for transparency violations, including an ad repository that left out who paid for each ad.

Brazil and Australia apply the same principle to bribery and corporate misconduct. Brazil’s Clean Company Law, in force since 2014, makes a company strictly liable when the company’s employees or agents bribe public officials for the company’s benefit. Prosecutors have to prove the bribe and the benefit. The law allows a fine of up to 20% of the prior year’s gross revenue, and the fine can never be less than the benefit the company obtained. Australia’s 2019 corporate penalties law sets the maximum civil penalty for a company at the greatest of several measures. Those measures include three times the benefit obtained and 10% of annual turnover, up to 910 million Australian dollars.

Ohio’s criminal code caps corporate fines the way Washington State caps campaign penalties: $25,000 for an organization convicted of a first-degree felony and $50,000 for one convicted of murder. FirstEnergy, the Akron-based electric utility, funneled more than $60 million through dark money groups, including one controlled by Larry Householder, then speaker of the Ohio House. In exchange, the company got House Bill 6. Republican state Reps. Jamie Callender and Shane Wilkin sponsored the bill, which created a $1 billion nuclear plant bailout funded by ratepayers. Ohio repealed the bailout’s nuclear subsidies in March 2021. Householder was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2023.

Federal prosecutors charged Householder in July 2020. Since then, FirstEnergy has agreed or been ordered to pay about $600 million:

• $230 million under a 2021 federal deferred prosecution agreement

• $100 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024

• $20 million to the state of Ohio under a 2024 non-prosecution agreement

• $250.7 million ordered by Ohio’s utility regulators in November 2025

Under Brazil’s law, the fine alone could have reached about $2.2 billion, which is 20% of FirstEnergy’s $11 billion in 2019 revenue.

In 1968, the University of Chicago economist Gary Becker, who later won the 1992 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, set out the arithmetic for whether a penalty like that deters. The odds of getting caught, multiplied by the penalty, have to be greater than what the offender gains. Alexander Dyck, a finance professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and two colleagues estimated that “in normal times only one-third of corporate frauds are detected.” Their data covers 1996 to 2004. They measured undetected fraud using the 2002 collapse of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen, when new auditors examined Andersen’s former clients. At one-in-three odds, the roughly $600 million FirstEnergy agreed or was ordered to pay works out to an expected cost of about $200 million, set against a $1 billion bailout. For the expected cost to be greater than the prize, the penalty has to pass $3 billion.

Ohio already wrote the three-times multiplier into law. Ohio’s corrupt-activity statute lets a court impose a fine of up to “three times the gross value gained or three times the gross loss caused,” whichever is greater. Ohio’s own settlement with FirstEnergy was $20 million.

Ohio’s prosecutors charged the executives. A Summit County grand jury indicted Charles “Chuck” Jones, FirstEnergy’s former chief executive, and Michael Dowling, the company’s former senior vice president of external affairs. The state charges include engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, which is the charge Ohio’s triple-gain fine applies to. Their first trial ended in March with the jury split 10 to 2 for conviction, and the grand jury reindicted both men on June 4. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost resigned effective June 7. Gov. Mike DeWine appointed Andy Wilson, Ohio’s former public safety director, to replace Yost. As of the reindictment, Wilson had not said whether he would retry the case. On Nov. 3, Ohio voters choose a new attorney general: Keith Faber, the Republican state auditor, or John Kulewicz, a Democrat on the Upper Arlington City Council.

Criminal charges against executives answer a problem with corporate fines: shareholders pay them. Two law professors documented this in the Texas Law Review in 2021: Dorothy Lund of Columbia Law School and Natasha Sarin of Yale Law School, a former counselor to then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. In federal prosecutions of public companies from 2001 to 2018, companies prosecuted more than once paid fines equal to about 0.22% of their assets. Companies prosecuted once paid about 16.84%. Lund and Sarin concluded that deterrence has to reach the people who facilitate the misconduct.

The strongest evidence against this idea comes from South Korea, which has gone further than any other country I looked at in sending executives to prison. South Korea’s Serious Accidents Punishment Act, in force since January 2022, exposes owners and chief executives to at least a year in prison, or a fine, when a worker dies because the company neglected safety. Counting the first nine months of each year, workplace deaths fell from 510 in 2022 to 459 in 2023 and 443 in 2024. They then rose to 457 in the first nine months of 2025. In September 2025, the Suwon District Court sentenced Park Soon-kwan, chief executive of the battery maker Aricell, to 15 years over a fire that killed 23 workers in June 2024. In April, an appeals panel cut the sentence to four years after giving him credit for his settlements with victims’ families.

Criminology & Public Policy, a journal of the American Society of Criminology, published a review of 58 studies in 2016, written by a team of criminologists led by Natalie Schell-Busey. The review found that punishment alone had no significant deterrent effect on companies. Combining several measures, such as punishment paired with regular inspections, had a consistent deterrent effect. The review is a decade old and the studies in it are older, and it is still the most complete review of the question I found.

The legal limit on bigger fines came from the Meta case itself. Three of the nine justices on the Washington Supreme Court would have ruled that the $24.6 million penalty violates the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. That ban has applied to the states since the U.S. Supreme Court decided Timbs v. Indiana in 2019. Under United States v. Bajakajian, a 1998 Supreme Court decision, the test is whether a fine is grossly disproportional to the gravity of the offense. Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud’s dissent said courts “must consider the defendant’s actual, concrete, illegal actions.” A fine set as a share of revenue will face that challenge every time.

The same court has already answered part of that challenge. City of Seattle v. Long, decided in 2021, involved a homeless man whose truck Seattle impounded. In that case, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that “an inquiry into an offender’s ability to pay is necessary” when deciding whether a fine is excessive. Whitener’s lead opinion in the Meta case cited Long and counted Meta’s resources against Meta. The opinion also said that “judgments about the appropriate punishment for an offense belong in the first instance to the legislature.” A court that weighs a homeless man’s ability to pay can also weigh the ability to pay of a company that earns $22.9 million an hour, and the legislature sets the scale.

I came away convinced that the size of a penalty works only when two other things are in place. The first is a real chance of getting caught. The second is a named executive who answers personally for compliance, the rule Britain applies to senior bank managers under the Senior Managers and Certification Regime. American states already have tools for the first part. Thirty-three states and territories have false claims acts that let a private citizen sue on the government’s behalf over fraud against the government and keep a share of the money recovered. New York’s act covers income tax fraud by people earning more than $1 million. In Washington State, the first case against Facebook followed a reporter’s request for records the law required the company to provide.

Since January 2025, the federal government has canceled 212 enforcement actions against 205 corporations, according to Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group Ralph Nader founded in 1971. Ninety of those corporations had ties to the president or his administration, 53 of them through gifts such as donations to the inaugural committee. Enforcement against corporations that corrupt elections now depends on state attorneys general, county prosecutors, city attorneys and state legislatures.

What I learned from Meta and FirstEnergy is that state legislatures set the price of corrupting an election. Washington State set that price at $10,000 a violation, and Ohio set it at $25,000 a felony. Several democracies set the price as a substantial share of the company’s revenue. By Becker’s arithmetic, the price has to be several times what the company stands to gain or the process will essentially be useless. If we want a democracy, we need to hold corporations accountable. Would you make a phone call or send an email to help that happen? Check out the call to action below and be an effective activist with the rest of the Existentialist Republic community.

Buy the ER some coffee by clicking this sentence.

CALL TO ACTION

Legislators can change the cost of corporate criminality with one sentence each. The first sentence is adapted from Ohio’s corrupt-activity statute. Any state can add it to the section of the criminal code that caps fines for corporations:

In lieu of the fine authorized by this section, the court may impose a fine not exceeding the greater of three times the gross value gained or three times the gross loss caused.

The second sentence applies to campaign disclosure laws like Washington State’s. It uses the ceiling the European Union’s Digital Markets Act sets for a gatekeeper platform that supplies incorrect information, 1% of total worldwide annual revenue. For Meta, that would be about $2 billion:

For a person who intentionally violates this title after a prior judgment under this title, the court may impose a civil penalty of up to one percent of the person’s annual gross revenue.

Readers who want these sentences in their state’s law can send them to their state legislators. Entering an address in Plural Policy’s free legislator lookup shows who those legislators are (this link opens the lookup). The Washington State Legislature convenes Jan. 11. In Ohio, both candidates for attorney general can be asked before Nov. 3 whether they will retry Jones and Dowling.

The Existentialist Republic Library

Buy a physical copy of my newest book, Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism, by clicking this sentence.
Get the FREE PDF of the book ($0.00) in the BMAC shop by clicking this sentence.

Our websites
The Existentialist Republic — the news site: every article, all 34 calls to action and all 10 model bills written for state legislators
The ER — the campaign hub: we publish the reporting, then the campaigns that come out of it, seven running now
The Activist Cipher — a free guided path to being an effective activist: which official to ask, what to ask for, and what to do with the answer; no email address required
Gavel Grab — the legal news publication I own and edit
ChristopherArmitage.com — my work in one place
The ER Store — books, journals, stickers, shirts, hats, mugs and posters

Books
Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder — physical copy / free download
The American Reformation: How States Can Use the Constitution to Break Authoritarian Capture — physical copy / free download
Intro to Soft Secession — physical copy / free download
Oppositional Federalism and You — physical copy / free download
Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download
Grab Them By The E.A.R.R.: How to Get Politicians to Do What You Want — physical copy / free download
Being Dangerous: Go From Activist to Operative — free download
WE REBEL: An Activist Journal — physical copy
Activism Journal, softcover

More free downloads
Soft Secession: 100 Policies That Pass
Four Completed Model Legislation Bills (all 10 are on the site)
The Opposition Guide to Tax Warfare
Six-Panel Soft Secession Brochure
Prosecution Memo: Jonathan Ross
Bumper Stickers