Facebook’s $5 billion FTC fine is an embarrassing joke

Facebook’s stock went up after news of a record-breaking $5 billion FTC fine for various privacy violations broke today.

That, as The New York Times’ Mike Isaac points out, is the real story here: the United States government spent months coming up with a punishment for Facebook’s long list of privacy-related bad behavior, and the best it could do was so weak that Facebook’s stock price went up.