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Comment by zetazzed | Hacker News Reader

Wow, what's even the point of such a small fine? Even in their reduced revenue state, X probably does $3 bln/year in revenue? So this fine is 1/10000th of their annual revenue for the company. X seems to have barely even tried to avoid this, leaving "some questions entirely blank" in the questionnaire to explain their approach. Given this fine size, I can see why they didn't bother getting a team of moderation and legal experts to huddle on the documents.

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Filling in a regulatory questionnaire like this is amateurish at best and speaks to really poor governance and internal controls (not necessarily surprising here?). This this was a bank I’d expect the people involved to swiftly have departed well before this announcement.

This will very likely draw closer scrutiny of their processes and actual enforcement actions (a regulator being annoyed enough to issue a public fine in this, or really any, amount over a sloppy response to a routine sort of data gathering is quite unusual for any industry; people normally at least have the professionalism to put /some/ answers down. )

There's an honest expectation that a chat platform is going to respond to the government at the same level a bank would?

Further, I find the government's approach to managing child abuse to be poor governance and a complete mockery of internal legislation. How is a survey from twitter intended to help them honestly combat this problem and prevent children from being victimized? It really looks like a giant "CYA" exercise by the government, and I find it hard to blame X or Google for not taking it particularly seriously.

Why not? Twitter's market cap/revenue is probably larger than that of many banks and certainly more than many hedge funds, which are regulated out the wazoo. Rest of your questions seem disingenuous, if governments didn't consult tech firms about their policies and metrics on this issue people would be complaining about heavy handed regulation based on ignorant assumptions.

> There's an honest expectation that a chat platform is going to respond to the government at the same level a bank would?

If I was an investor in X, I would be concerned. Isn't the end goal to be an "everything app", not just a "chat platform"? How is X going to become a payment processor (a key element of "everything apps" like WeChat) if even the kinds of questions a chat platform gets are beyond its capability to answer?

Out of compliance banks have actual consequences.

You can do compliance so badly as a bank that in a single day your entire business can be taken away from the owners/shareholders and given to a different bank to operate. Literally overnight.

Twitter regulators can fine Twitter for bad compliance to the tune of approximately a nickel.

380,000 is a couple FTEs for a year, right? I'm surprised that wouldn't have been enough to hire some moderation and legal experts for however long it would take to fill out a questionnaire.

According to levels.fyi, not even. Median "Senior SWE" salary/compensation, $339K.

Typically this sort of fine is a warning shot meant to encourage compliance rather than to damage. I don’t have time right now to dig in and verify, but there’s a Guardian article that mentions the potential for assessing retroactive daily non-compliance fines going back to March 2023. You’d also expect ongoing fines in that case.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/16/x-fined-6...

But how much of that revenue is profit, and how much of that profit derives from Australia.

Assuming 3bn in revenue, Australia represents 1% of Twitters users, and they have a profit margin of 5%. That means profit is maybe 1.5m. So that's fining them 25% of the year's profit for failing to fill out a form properly.

To be very cynical, to ensure that only large companies can enter this market. If you're a sole proprietor making a chat app, this fine for filling out a form wrong ruins your life. If you're X, you can ignore it basically consequence free. Thus, only X can be in the market.

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