A Washington court rules Meta repeatedly violated the state’s campaign finance transparency law for political ads and must pay penalties yet to be determined (Jim Brunner/The Seattle Times)

David Gutman / The Seattle Times:
Meta receives a ~$24.7M fine, the maximum possible, after a Washington judge found it had intentionally violated campaign finance disclosure laws 822 times  —  Meta, Facebook’s parent company, was fined nearly $25 million Wednesday for intentionally and repeatedly violating Washington’s campaign finance laws.

TechCrunch:
BrandTotal and Unimania agreed to a permanent injunction banning them from using and scraping Facebook and Instagram, and will pay a “significant financial sum”  —  Facebook parent Meta has settled a lawsuit in the U.S. against two companies that had engaged in data scraping operations …

Makena Kelly / The Verge:
TikTok expands its political content rules to limit fundraising by politicians and political groups, ahead of a full ban on fundraising  —  Starting Wednesday, TikTok is expanding its elections rules to make it harder for politicians and political groups to fundraise using the platform — and plans to ban all fundraising activity soon.

Aisha Malik / TechCrunch:
Instagram debuts transparency tools to let users with professional accounts, like businesses and creators, know if their content is ineligible to be recommended  —  Instagram announced today that it’s introducing new transparency tools so you can see whether your photos and videos are recommended in the app.

Emily Baker-White / Forbes:
Web novel apps backed by ByteDance and Tencent are running hundreds of Facebook and Instagram ads showing sexual assault, violent erotica, and acts of self-harm  —  Some of the ads include descriptions of sexual violence, paired with images of battered women and photos of male fitness influencers, which were used without permission.

Cecilia D’Anastasio / Bloomberg:
Microsoft’s Xbox publishes its first transparency report on content moderation and reveals it took action against more than 4.3M inauthentic accounts in H1 2022  —  Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox released its first transparency report on Monday, detailing how the gaming giant moderates its 3 billion global players.