Facebook announced earnings today; other new information besides the fine contributed to the after-hours jump.

This is a very strange way to put it. More likely, the fine was priced in with some level of uncertainty, the with the fine having been decided, the market corrected relative to its estimates.

> by increasing their market cap $20 billion

Is this actually meaningful to any company that isn't IPOing or releasing new shares? I am not pro-facebook by any means but it's not clear this means much aside from how much their investors like them, again of questionable value as the majority of votes are privately held by Zuckerberg.

Increase the value of shares and options and owned by the very people who made the mistake? Yes, increasing an individual's net worth doesn't exactly discourage future mistakes.

Unless Zuckerberg is immediately about to sell I don’t see how this incentivizes any behavior at the company. It’s a trailing indicator of performance, not a leading one, and seems to reflect public opinion more than anything.

We should never read too much into such numbers, but, technically, expectations of a $25bn fine could explain exactly what you describe.

as it so turns out, you can't rely on capitalism to even have any morality, much less enforce one

Eh, a capitalist system is going to reflect the moral framework of the participants. The participant here is the stock market, and its moral framework is based on economic growth and profit for shareholders. In that regard this was a good outcome and, as a result, is rewarded.

Which means it has no morality no matter how you try to twist it.

Sure, no intrinsic morality...more of a passthrough.

I try to think of it more as utterly sociopathic (in more or less the strict medical definition of the term), and things seem to really make a lot of sense under that framework.