Good Tuesday. (Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.)

Inside the F.T.C.’s Facebook investigation

The Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce as soon as this week a record-breaking $5 billion fine for Facebook over violations of user privacy, which could also include a requirement for increased oversight. But an investigation by Tony Romm of the WaPo suggests that the punishment has been drastically watered down.

The fine could have been much higher, unidentified sources told Mr. Romm:

• “The agency computed a theoretical maximum fine that reached into the tens of billions of dollars.”

• But Facebook “believed at most it should be paying into the hundreds of millions” and “felt it could easily prevail in court if it had to battle the F.T.C. over how it calculates fines and what qualifies as a violation.”

Holding Mark Zuckerberg directly liable was ruled out, these sources added:

• Democratic members of the commission long hinted at a “belief that corporate leaders should be held personally accountable for their companies’ repeated privacy mishaps.”