LONDON: A Russian court has fined Google a staggering $20 decillion, the largest financial penalty ever issued.

In fact, $20 decillion (20 followed by 33 zeros), which in Russia’s own currency is equivalent to 2 undecillion rubles (a 37-digit figure), far exceeds the combined gross domestic product of every country in the world, which is estimated to be about $110 trillion (a figure with a mere 13 zeros).

The amount dwarfs the $206 billion paid by tobacco companies to the US government in 1998, which remains the largest civil lawsuit settlement.

Google said: “We have ongoing legal matters relating to Russia. For example, civil judgments that include compounding penalties have been imposed upon us in connection with disputes regarding the termination of accounts, including those of sanctioned parties. We do not believe these ongoing legal matters will have a material adverse effect.”

The fine, which a judge said contained “many, many zeros,” relates to a dispute that began in 2020 when Google-owned YouTube banned Tsargrad, a Russian ultra-nationalist, pro-Kremlin channel, from the platform in compliance with US sanctions.

Since then, Google has blocked more than 1,000 YouTube channels and more than 5.5 million videos from Russia, halted advertising services in the country in March 2022, and paused monetization of content that supports Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In response, a number of relatively small fines were imposed by Russian courts but they went unpaid and Russian business newspaper RBC reported that the amounts owed have grown immensely as result of compound penalties initially set at $1,025 a day and doubling each week.

Details of the current total of the fine emerged on Tuesday, as Google reported quarterly earnings of $88.3 billion for the three months to September. Based on that amount, it would take the company more than 56 septillion (a figure with 24 zeros) years to pay off the fine, which is more than 4 trillion times the age of the universe.

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesperson for the Kremlin, urged Google parent company Alphabet to stop blocking Russian YouTube channels. However, he conceded that the massive fine, which he said he cannot even pronounce, is purely symbolic.

“These demands, they simply demonstrate the essence of our channels’ claims against Google,” Peskov said. “Google should not restrict the activities of our broadcasters, but Google is doing this.

“Probably, this (growing fine) should be a reason for Google’s management to take notice and rectify the situation. It’s the best thing the company can do.”

SAN FRANCISCO, California: X’s crowd-sourced fact-checking program, called Community Notes, isn’t addressing the flood of US election misinformation on Elon Musk’s social media platform, according to a report published Wednesday by a group that tracks online speech.
The nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate analyzed the Community Notes feature and found that accurate notes correcting false and misleading claims about the US elections were not displayed on 209 out of a sample of 283 posts deemed misleading — or 74 percent.
Misleading posts that did not display Community Notes even when they were available included false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that voting systems are unreliable, CCDH said.

In the cases where Community Notes were displayed, the original misleading posts received 13 times more views than their accompanying notes, the group added.
Community Notes lets X users write fact checks on posts after the users are accepted as contributors to the program. The checks are then rated by other users based on their accuracy, sources, how easily they are to understand, and whether they use neutral language. The program was launched in 2021 by the previous leadership of the site — then known as Twitter — and was called Birdwatch. Musk renamed it Community Notes after he took over the site in 2022.

Last year, X sued CCDH, blaming the group for the loss of “tens of millions of dollars” in advertising revenue after it documented an increase in hate speech on the site. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge in March.
Keith Coleman, a vice president of product at X who oversees Community Notes, said in a statement that the program “maintains a high bar to make notes effective and maintain trust across perspectives, and thousands of election and politics related notes have cleared that bar in 2024. In the last month alone, hundreds of such notes have been shown on thousands of posts and have been seen tens of millions of times. It is because of their quality that notes are so effective.”
San Francisco-based X also pointed to external academic research that has shown Community Notes to be trustworthy and effective.
Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, however, said the group’s research “suggests that X’s Community Notes are little more than a Band Aid on a torrent of hate and disinformation that undermines our democracy and further polarizes our communities.”