> For decades I have harangued reporters about writing down really big numbers, most often budget numbers, without providing any context that would make them meaningful for their audience. Even though leading news outlets, like the New York Times (NYT), Washington Post (WaPo), and National Public Radio (NPR), have well-educated audiences, most readers/listeners have no idea what $250 billion, or some other huge sum, over the next decade means. (Often the time period over which money will be spent is not even specified in a piece – it does matter.)

https://cepr.net/the-new-york-times-big-deficit-numbers/

The Times Is Working on Ways to Make Numbers-Based Stories Clearer for Readers By Margaret Sullivan - October 18, 2013 2:46 pm

https://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/the-times-...

Not sure it would have give the correct context (i.e., Facebook value) but would give swome context.

Maybe they're lazy?

And no matter how "well-educated" their audiences are, a very large fraction of them and their audiences are innumerate, it's hard to get across the message you desire.

yes but on the other hand if they combined it with the hours of revenue you would have a big number that looks impressive being dwarfed by the realization of how big and scary that means Facebook is.

I would suggest something more like "Facebook fined 15 hours of profit for breaching order in Giphy takeover investigation"

It’s quite public knowledge that most companies avail accounting practices to lower profit over revenue. In fact, it’s not even a trick - investing profits back into your business is common sense.

Think of someone living in SF and someone living somewhere in the central US in a cheap region, both earning 100k$. If you fine both of them 10k$, the latter one probably won't have a big problem, since the living costs are rather low. Someone in SF, though, will spent most of their income on rent, so this fine will hit them hard. Calling the fine 10% of their income will totally misrepresent the impact.

Sure. But Facebook isn’t one of those.

There are also say why do they only pick on American companies but that's mostly because of SV is in the US.

However, that only works if one's willing to forego paying shareholders dividends (which are paid out of net). Lots of people are not willing to do that.

This juxtaposes a local fine on a subsidiary to a conglomerate's global revenue. That's fine. It's revealing, in some ways. But it's more clickbait than the actual fine.