Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to families of children harmed online
abcnews.go.com
abcnews.go.com
> "It's terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered," Zuckerberg told them. "And this is why we invest so much and are going to continue doing industry-leading efforts to make sure that no one has to go through the things your families have had to suffer."
One may presume industry will get better and force maintaining an industry leading result to become an adequate result to address the problem, but that is still leaving the impetus of any change to an outside force.
It's an expression of sympathy and a commitment to prevent future occurrences of whatever caused the suffering, using language approved by a legal team. It's an explicit non-apology, since an apology would be an admission of fault or wrongdoing.
[someone cheated on their partner]: Cheating is reprehensible and should not happen... [as opposed to, I'm sorry for having cheated and hurt you, etc...]
"We measurably harmed you and are going to compensate you thusly"
His legal team will not allow that verbiage because it opens the door to basically infinite lawsuits
And anyway:
> Each of the CEOs addressed the families in the room and gave their condolences
So.. adults every one of them?
What level of responsibility do creators have for criminal evil acts that people do with their creations? I know a lot of Fediverse folks who point to the Malaysia-genocide connection with Facebook as as evidence that the Fedi is superior but the Fediverse is based on open-source software that anybody could use to run a server which is all genocide all the time and the only thing anybody else can do is defederate and claim they have clean hands. I bet people involved with that genocide used Linux and Windows too. Are we going to blame Richard Stallman? Sure you can violate the GPL by not publishing the source code for a consumer product but there is nothing to stop you from using it to make a killer drone.
(Myself I quit Facebook in 2016 but I did get back in because I really wanted to develop software for an affordable XR headset)
I think you mean Rohingya genocide [1] in which human rights organizations asserts that facebook playing/ed role [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutupalong_refugee_camp
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
Note they got kicked out of that country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_Facebook
would have been kicked out sooner had they not been complicit in the genocide. It does really excuse them but any company that takes a stand against that sort of thing is likely to get banned. Hypothetically a company like Facebook could choose ‘exit’ and walk away with clean hands, the open source developers of something like Mastodon have no recourse of any kind if those tools are misused.
I don’t question their complicity so far as it goes but I don’t know if anyone could have done better. Should Microsoft have turned off Microsoft Word for them? Should Qualcomm or other telecom vendors have shut off their phone network because they were misusing patented technology?
Sometimes I think genociders and quasi-genociders play ten dimensional chess and the rest of us are playing one dimensional tic tac toe. That is, our corporations think a quarter ahead, our governments an election ahead. They think ahead for hundreds or thousands of years that it will take for their enemies to be truly forgotten (e.g. when Poland was partitioned the parties had a secret treaty that ‘Poland’ would never be talked about; Austria-Hungary sure thought Austria-Hungary would be around longer than the Polish people.). You’d better believe Israel looks back to 2000 years ago when they got kicked out by the Romans and are similarly willing to wait a few hundred years to completely expel the Palestinians and erase their memory if it takes that. (Ironically if they hadn’t been kicked out by the Romans they might be forgotten now except for their contribution to ancient literature.)
Now maybe if the petroleum industry grew a backbone we could send a country like that to the stone age.
Seriously, though, I was connecting to dial-up Bulletin Board Systems as a teenager, don't regret it at all, and would hate to deprive younger generations of the opportunity to go online. I ended up meeting a lot of older strangers, which overprotective helicopter parents would consider "dangerous" nowadays, but it was awesome, and I made a lot of friends.
Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents.
Wouldn’t that make GP even better qualified to comment on the harms of social media use? :p
I certainly wouldn’t say that a pack-a-day smoker with lung cancer isn’t qualified to speak on the dangers of teen smoking. Quite the opposite in fact.
What does that have to do with "children harmed online"?
To be fair, the article itself opens by citing both the mental health allegations as well as "exploitation and abuse". Given we're dealing with an emotionally charged political hot button issue, it's safe to say these are intentionally muddy waters.
> Let's be real about the risks: statistically speaking, the most dangerous adults to a child are not strangers, they're the child's own parents
Depends on what danger you’re talking about.
"Everything that happens before the age of thirty-five is normal. After that, everything is a symptom of aging."
1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
– Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt
I find the idea of Snap checking for duplicate accounts to be wildly less invasive than them analyzing all of my communication.
Moreover dab pens and "$15 grams" are legal in multiple states, including the one in which Snap themselves are based. What exactly is the injury and remedy here?
I think the hearing today truly proved this argument simply doesn’t hold water anymore. It was a bloodbath.
These companies invest billions in protecting kids against specific types of content but it’s just not good enough. At the end of the day they’re profiting from clicks and views and engagement. They’re profiting from addiction, depression, abuse and suicide, and should be held liable. It’s the only way they’ll actually fix it.
I truly feel for the families in pain. No parent should have to lose their child.
If I had to pull a silver lining it's that bipartisanship from the two parties on a societal issue that deserves urgency and a permanent fix. Hope they continue until that goal is reached.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-catholic-daycare-ce...