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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

The title here doesn't match the article headline. The documents make Facebook look bad but so far I haven't seen anything incriminating, in the sense of violating a US Federal criminal statute. Are there credible allegations of something like securities fraud or wire fraud here?

Note that there is no generally no law against disseminating incorrect or "harmful" information.

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The section at the end -- "Haugen contacted state officials and the SEC" talks about the parts of the whistleblower documents that show that Facebook was misleading investors. That is criminal under current US law.

I think people are more mad about the other things in the documents--most people are more sympathetic to harm done to kids' mental health than to investors' bottom line, but lying to investors is the one that's illegal.

This might fall under Matt Levine's theory that "everything is securities fraud"

The fact that it's possible to question whether or not any illegal behavior has been revealed doesn't mean that Facebook didn't cause – and is not causing – any harm doesn't mean there's no basis to Haugen's revelations.

Rather, it means that under the current regulatory regime, there are no penalties for behavior harmful to consumers. That the only recourse is to file with the SEC alleging harm to the stockholders is simply a reflection of the fact that the mantra of "shareholder value" has become the only law that corporations have to follow.

IMO Twitter and Reddit cause more mental harm than all FB properties combined.

we can walk and chew gum. Looking at one doesn't preclude looking at the other.

Also in terms of disinformation I feel like YouTube is under targeted compared to FB.

Yeah this appears to just be some embarrassing things but nothing outright illegal or really even surprising. What company doesn't have embarrassing secrets they'd rather not be leaked? None that I've worked at anyway, and none of those were evil.

They’ve lied to the public and (if the lies were material to investors) that’s securities fraud.

Which says more about the emasculated regulatory regime in the US than anything else. There are no penalties, or none of any real meaning, for causing to harm to consumers or the community, but violating the holy tenet of maximizing shareholder value is almost a cardinal sin.

Every single one of us has caused some harm to the community at some point in our lives. That doesn't mean it should be a criminal offense.

Perhaps, but no individual continually does it for years, harming millions if not billions of others, in pursuit of profits.

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