Facebook's record-setting $5 billion fine from the Federal Trade Commission was initially a much higher number, according to a new report in The Washington Post.
The FTC calculated that Facebook could be fined "tens of billions of dollars," and the agency intended to impose rules on the company's senior executives — including Mark Zuckerberg — that would hold them personally accountable if Facebook made more errors in the future.
In the end, none of that happened.
Instead, Facebook is facing a $5 billion penalty.
The fine is a record for the FTC — a move seemingly intended to set a precedent for the kind of punishment that tech giants could receive for mishandling their users' data.
Read more: The FTC has approved a roughly $5 billion settlement with Facebook
Many have characterized it as essentially a slap on the wrist for Zuckerberg and his social-media company in the way of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where data from over 50 million Facebook users was used without permission by a political data analytics firm.
The data was used to target American voters in the 2016 US Presidential election.
As such, the FTC sought to fine Facebook tens of billions of dollars and to impose orders on senior level executives — if similar errors occurred in the future, those executives could be held personally responsible.
But, according to the Washington Post report, the FTC dropped those intentions as Facebook's lawyers pushed back and threatened to take the government to court.
