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Comment by Kranar | Hacker News Reader

What expertise in law do you have to make such a stunning conclusion about Facebook's liability? Is there any precedent for media companies being held liable over such a thing? Do you also understand that if it were true that Facebook could be held legally liable for what you're claiming, that it wouldn't matter if they admit it or not. Admission of liability or guilt is never a requirement to be awarded damages or subject to penalties in any circumstance.

Is it your position that if someone produces content that causes depression, that they are liable for damages? Do you also extend this legal opinion you likely just made up and have no subject matter knowledge on to other forms of media or websites? Depressing music? Depressing novels? Depressing video games? Or is it only depressing social media websites that you feel are held to some kind of standard about depression?

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Generally, admitting that your product causes a medical problem makes it easy for people to sue you over it.

You’re right that they could be sued even if they don’t admit it, but then they would have a defense which would be far weaker if they had already admitted it.

Okay, let's say I don't believe you and I have made a good faith effort to look into this subject and have found no evidence that anyone has ever been sued for causing depression, do you have any evidence or way to substantiate your claim and demonstrate to me that you are correct? I am aware of emotional distress lawsuits, but what's being claimed here is quite different.

Do I have no choice but to take you at your word that you're right about what is a pretty big legal claim being made here. Are people just making up things about how the law works, or am I genuinely just very ignorant on this subject?

In other words, can you cite the legal principal here, or precedent, or some kind of actual reference that shows some kind of informed discussion is taking place on this subject instead of a bunch of people making uninformed claims that sound appealing?

From my uninformed point of view that I am happy to be challenged on, suing Facebook for causing depression makes about as much sense as suing McDonald's for obesity. There is no legal principal upon which one could successfully do so and while people have tried, they failed miserably [1] (as in the case was dismissed with prejudice, which is one of the worst outcomes).

[1] https://money.cnn.com/2003/01/22/news/companies/mcdonalds/

I would say your effort wasn't very high then. Keywords to search for are "Mental anguish" and "Emotional distress". "Depression" is not a thing you can really sue for, but mental harm associated with it definitely is.

Given your response that you think emotional distress could in anyway be applicable here, I am fairly confident at this point that few people are properly informed to discuss the legality of this with the degree of certainty and authority that is being expressed. For one, as per White v. Monsanto [1] mental anguish and emotional distress requires "conduct that is heinous and beyond the standards of civilized decency or utterly intolerable in a civilized society."

I think at this point it's quite clear that people are just speaking from a very superficial understanding or outright just making things up about this topic but are doing so as if they are subject matter experts and while this is a open discussion forum and you can say whatever you want, I suppose I expected better.

[1] https://scholar.google.ca/scholar_case?case=1620366536753369...

Does Facebook actually need to inflict the distress or just be complicit? Cause I have little doubt that "conduct that is heinous and beyond the standards of civilized decency or utterly intolerable in a civilized society" takes place on social media - after all, high schoolers use social media.

Earlier you said:

> From my uninformed point of view that I am happy to be challenged on

Now you say:

> I think at this point it's quite clear that people are just speaking from a very superficial understanding or outright just making things up about this topic but are doing so as if they are subject matter experts

How would you know, if your point of view is uninformed?

Are you a lawyer?

I realized maybe a week or two ago regarding subjects that I am an expert on and professionally trained that people on Hacker News discuss it in a very uninformed manner and out of ignorance and that this ignorance spreads across the site like wildfire. People make bold and categorical claims that one would only expect of a subject matter expert when it's clear that they're anything but that. The issue is that the number of experts on a topic is much smaller than the number of people who read a comment, find it appealing, and upvote it, so it's hard to dispel a lot of misinformation. Furthermore based on my own experience, the amount of effort needed to demonstrate that someone is wrong is significant, consumes a lot of time, and even if you manage to do so, it likely is nested deep within the conversation and goes unnoticed.

In my own area of expertise, I have literally been downvoted for providing links to primary sources that conclusively disprove unsourced claims.

So given that I know that discussions in my area of expertise on this site is full of misinformation, I have now come to doubt the quality and reliability of conversations on this site on some other topics that tend to attract a lot of assertive discussion. Topics that don't attract a lot of assertive discussion still seem legit, for example few people make assertions or categorical claims in physics discussions or pure math discussions and the few who do I think are trustworthy since they tend to provide extensive explanations justifications, and sources. Most people in those topics are inquisitive, they ask questions, they make clear that they have an opinion or a belief and wonder if others share that opinion... but when it comes to law people just downright state things as if they're facts and they're qualified to know that it's a fact.

So I now doubt that many people on this site who discuss the law with such authority are remotely informed to do so and that motivated my original line of inquiry; is the original poster and everyone else in agreement with them actually informed to understand the law to make such a big statement on the subject, or are they just making things up the same way people on this site make things up about the topic that I know I am an expert on. Are other readers upvoting comments because they can verify it and upvotes are serving as a kind of quality control mechanism, or are people upvoting comments that sound appealing and that they wish was true, but really are not qualified to know, and hence upvotes are a reflection of this site's ignorance on a topic.

I can only answer that for myself, but I think the replies to my line of inquiry have been poor and misinformed, and so I think the best way to make use of this site going forward is to avoid participating in discussions other than those I think still retain some degree of quality: physics, math, machine learning, things where I trust there are enough experts here that no one would make such strong claims that are false without being shut down by the community for doing so.

Law, biology and health care, the environment, finance/economics are not among those topics.

> So given that I know that discussions in my area of expertise on this site is full of misinformation, I have now come to doubt the quality and reliability of conversations on this site on some other topics that tend to attract a lot of assertive discussion.

Not just misinformation, but active disinformation.

> physics, math, machine learning, things where I trust there are enough experts here that no one would make such strong claims without immediately and easily being shut down by the community for doing so.

I think you are overestimating the quality on these subjects. They can be just as bad, and equally there can be highly technical and informative comments on law, biology, etc.

This site does not have consistency. Most answers to questions are poor and uninformed. However there is still good insight to be found.

It's worth noting that in this case (and in most discussions around non-IP law) the consensus HN view is usually what an informed person thinks the law should be based on something they heard on the news once and extended to try to generalise to some new situation that has never been tested in court.

Kranar is basically right here. It isn't at all clear that FB would be liable, and there isn't even a particularly strong case.

This may be true, in the sense that they cannot be sued at the drop of a hat, however it doesn’t mean this kind of research can’t cause legal problems for them over time. Torts are not the only problem for them to worry about. Regulation and legislation are also legal risks for them.

The general argument that it’s a bad idea for them to admit this still holds.

Generically moaning about how people are speaking from a position of being uninformed, especially when one is also uninformed, is a useless behavior here.

Bringing information or asking questions is the only way to solve that.

>Generically moaning about how people are speaking from a position of being uninformed.

That's because you're misrepresenting my position, which I have been very careful to explain.

There is nothing wrong or shameful about being uninformed on a topic and wanting to discuss topics that one is uninformed about. I am uninformed on a lot of topics, including law, and I'd love to participate in a discussion to better inform myself. I also encourage people to seek out information and participate in discussions that they do not understand, it's a great way to learn.

My complaint is that on this site, people who are uninformed speak with a degree of certitude that a reader who didn't know any better could confuse with expertise, and that results in widespread misinformation and degrades trust in this site. It also discourages actual experts from participating in discussions since people informed on a topic have to then compete with those who are uninformed, and based on my own experience having done so repeatedly, the amount of effort needed to do so is disproportionate. It's a lot easier to spread false information that's appealing and sounds good than it is to spread truthful information.

Asking questions is great, having experts answer questions is great, having people with different backgrounds relating topics outside of their area of expertise is also great and can lead to unique insights. But having someone make bold, unverifiable claims and everyone else upvoting and giving those claims prominence when they are false, simply because it sounds appealing is not good because it pushes away people who are experts.

> My complaint is that on this site, people who are uninformed speak with a degree of certitude that a reader who didn't know any better could confuse with expertise, and that results in widespread misinformation and degrades trust in this site.

I’m not misrepresenting you.

Are you somebody who doesn’t know any better? I don’t think think so, so why are you trying to protect this imaginary victim?

Do you speak with a degree of certitude? I think you do.

It’s pretty easy to question unverifiable claims, whereas complaining about other people’s tone of confidence while doing the same thing yourself just seems like it’s not likely to have a useful effect. It too is just a generic and unverifiable claim.

You aren’t wrong that misinformation spreads on public fora. However there is no evidence that you are an authority on how to resolve that issue.

The issue is that statements here about topics people don't understand are often outright wrong, but go unchallenged.

For example you said that FB can't be sued over this. That's wrong - it's just unlikely to succeed under current laws.

The rest of their problems with it are probably true, but the specific point is incorrect. That's the point being made here.

> For example you said that FB can't be sued over this.

Are you sure? Where?

> The issue is that statements here about topics people don't understand are often outright wrong, but go unchallenged.

Are you sure you are responding to the correct commenter? Here’s something I did write:

> It’s pretty easy to question unverifiable claims…

Which is what I recommend when you see something that you think is outright wrong.

Moaning long windedly about the fact that people say things you think are wrong is pointless.

If you see something you think is wrong or unclear to you, you can contribute to the conversation by asking a clarifying question.

>> For example you said that FB can't be sued over this.

> Are you sure? Where?

To quote:

"zepto> This may be true, in the sense that they cannot be sued at the drop of a hat.."

> From my uninformed point of view

Due to the tone of your over-confident first post, initially I thought you were a lawyer on Facebook's payroll making a deceitful argument.

You really think Facebook's lawyers would advise disclosing a link between Facebook usage and depression found in their internal studies? Do you really think that Facebook would even ever allow for that conclusion to be reached in this particular internal study? Come on.

Those are different questions than what OP got at with "If they did admit a link it would open Facebook to unimaginable legal liability"

Admitting to this fact could just be bad PR. Or bad for their growth and retention metrics, while not changing their legal liability.

Especially true if you are holding evidence that you knew it caused medical problems, but ignored that evidence and continued doing stuff that made it worse because it makes more money. At that point you pretty much have to start bribing people to look away, like the cigarette industry is notorious for.

Facebook has practically zero incentive to research damages they might be causing. Sure, they could do the ethically responsible thing and try to discover and mitigate issues... but if they were doing that, we wouldn't be at this state, would we?

They have done causal research and they have hidden it from FBers asking for results of the study.

Members from the well-being team tried to conduct research but was refused do to it because of “legal and PR” reasons. The well-being team was shut down.

All this will come out in lawsuits if/when they happen. Likely through attorney generals and not individuals.

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