Judge: Zuckerberg not liable for social media harm to children
nypost.com
nypost.com
Its a joke of course but behind it a lot of criticism towards the current system.
That's very vague. It seems like the accusation brought forth was Zuckerberg knowingly concealed the addictive behavior, but it seems like the best the prosecution came up with was just, "He's CEO, therefore he is liable." Unless I'm completely misunderstanding this.
The judge did not say that Meta itself isn’t responsible. I think their corporate priorities are probably misaligned with the good of humanity. But it isn’t Zuck by himself who did all this- it’s teams of researchers and software devs and product managers- that’s a corporation.
You probably couldn’t impose a large enough fine to prevent Meta optimizing for kids’ attention- they are such a huge source of profit. If you really want to protect the kids you need straight up regulatory bans.
There is an obvious difference between not preventing a harm that is a direct result of your activity, and not preventing a harm which isn't.
Secondly, him not directly feeding starving people in SF is not the same. It’s unrelated. He is not the mayor of SF, but he is the CEO of Meta.
How is this clear? What lever could Zuck pull that would prevent this harm?
From the research I’ve read the harm of social media is, almost exclusively, in the zone of what people post on it (ex: bullying) or what they are seeking to accomplish by posting (ex: looksmaxxing). I struggle to see how the harm that causes is caused by the ability to share it.
You could say the same about drug dealers, if one stops another one replaced him
How do you prevent kids using social media without 100% surveillance or not allowing internet access at all?
Do the parental controls on mobile phones not work? I'm not a parent, so I don't know, but it seem unbelievable to me that there isn't an effective way to grant internet access to kids without social media.
Do you think antivirus software prevents all viruses?
The same is true for parental control
Still, is it Zuckerberg's fault or just how capitalism works (optimize for max profit)?
I believe only strict regulations can help. Is there any regulation against addiction to (social) media?
And I am certain car companies won't be held liable for allowing starting without keys. Keys are only there because of theft.
> "It shall be unlawful to store or keep any firearm in any place unless such firearm is secured in a locked container or equipped with a tamper-resistant mechanical lock or other safety device, properly engaged so as to render such firearm inoperable by any person other than the owner or other lawfully authorized user."
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/mass-general-laws-c140-ss-...
Responsible gun owners have their guns locked up. Perhaps responsible parents can pay attention to their childrens' internet usage?
The same way as with everything else: Do your job as a parent.
You can’t control them 100% of the time.
Yours sound like the no true scotsman fallacy
I don't give them a phone, and all the screens in my house are in the shared living space. They also don't know the WiFi password, should they try to sneak in a device.
Could they use a friend's phone? Sure. I'm not really concerned in that case, because there's honestly nothing I can do, but it's such minimal exposure with a huge barrier that I doubt it's effectiveness in sustaining much addiction.
No phone is impossible when school requires one.
If a school provides a smartphone, it would be on IT to prevent misuse by students by using MDM.
If a parent provides the phone, then we circle back to the 'Parental Controls' that are available.
Apple, Parental Controls: https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121
Apple, MDM: https://www.apple.com/education/k12/deploy-and-manage/
Google Play, Parental Controls: https://safety.google/intl/en_us/families/parental-supervisi...
Google Play, MDM: https://support.google.com/googleplay/work/answer/7042221?hl...
But I get your point. Killing is illegal. social media harm is not. The analogy remains.
I do not trust myself with identifying when companies tweak the algorithm to mess with my psyche. How can I trust myself with identifying with my own kids except when it becomes really obvious in the content or in their behavior?
> Do we blame car manufacturers for young people driving and killing themselves or others?
Cars had no seat belts, had no crumple zone, would crush the driver when the engine got pushed in. We literally put more and more requirements on cars to make them as safe as reasonably possible.
If social media has negative effects why would we not legislate these companies in such a way as to reduce the negatives?
You can argue there is no negative effect if you want. But if they have negatives effects then don't we need to rein them in?
It's interesting to look at the triple standard of harm across different institutions though:
Science: your job is to learn things, you must bring every possible harm you can think of from your experiment to an ethical review board, and if there's a chance it might hurt people, you can't run your experiment.
Business: your job is to maximize profit, you may harm people in the pursuit of this as long as you do so within the bounds of the law.
Defense: your job is to kill people, do what you want as long as it's our enemies.
Clearly, people value killing foreigners > making money > discovering new knowledge.
Sure but there are differences between the psychological experiments. I would argue that running a sale is benign compared to manipulating words in social media post to see how it influences your mood. What effect will that have on people with already fragile psyches?
I understand its legal whatever facebook has done but still I think that there should be restrictions on the kind of psychological tests you can run like this. Unless I overestimate the effect these studies have.
> Clearly, people value killing foreigners > making money > discovering new knowledge.
Killing foreigners is mostly a way to maintain or gain influence so I would say its more: power > making money > discovering new. The killing foreigners part is just a means to an end.
This is such a dumb or disingenuous position.
Let's imagine you are a social media company, and these things happen:
1. people (researchers, media, doesn't matter) are reporting that they think the proliferation of negative sentiment on your social media is having a negative affect on user's moods.
2. based on your extensive experience and understanding of user behavior you think they are wrong. but still you recognize that if they are actually right it would be best for you to know that so you can make changes to fix it.
3. so, you decide to run an experiment where for some of the users you reduce the likelihood that they will see the types of posts that those researchers have identified as problematic, and you monitor the same sorts of signals that those researchers were looking at.
4. you get the results of your experiment. it doesn't actually matter what they say, if they say there's no effect, you now know that and apply it in the future, if they say there's a negative effect you try to mitigate it, if they say there's a positive effect maybe you try to amplify it. but really, that's not important because...
5. you tell people that you've done this research and made or not changes based on it. or it comes out in a leak that you did this by a disgruntled ex employee, or in a court case, also doesn't matter.
6. those same people as in (1), or others, frame the experiment you've done as a terrible thing where you were manipulating people's emotions for your own gain.
However, I stand by my belief that Social Media is a cancer on society. I divide history between “before Twitter” and “after Twitter”. Facebook went to shit when they started copying Twitter.
It is unclear to me how your position is different, it would seem that any fair law would have the same aspects where you would have to prove specifics. So without specifics hold the company liable, with hold the individuals.
Apparently free market enterprises are not that different after all, they happen to collect all profits and those who run these systems don't have liability.
I'm extremely curious how would the upcoming version of USA work as people who collected all the profits kept complaining endlessly and beared no responsibility for any problems are about to run it. Very interesting times.
Like no shit people, attention is addicting. This has been the cause of people doing stupid things since the dawn of community. Platforms providing the community / audience aren't responsible for the high of being on stage.
Not at all? I don't think that's how the real world works.
> But the judge found a lack of specifics about what Zuckerberg did wrong, and said “control of corporate activity alone is insufficient” to establish liability. Her decision does not affect related claims against Meta itself.
If I could undo anything in this world it would be social media.
... he posted.
‘You criticize society yet you are part of society’ isn’t the gotcha you think it is.
They probably do use social media, but not in the bubble of the people who were surprised at the outcome of the election. That's actually one of the problems with social media. People are able to connect exclusively with in group and cut everyone else out of their lives.
So direct evidence that Zuck directed the wrongdoing was not given. If it was, Zuck would know precisely what he has to defend himself against.
Instead, Zuck was labeled responsible by the plaintiff because he could stop the harm and did not stop the harm. This is not something anyone can defend themselves against. For starters, Zuck would have to admit that harm was done to be able to defend himself.
Secondly, the method of harm should lead directly to him. Without a trial establishing the method of harm that was taken, he is not able to defend himself.
What were the AGs thinking? Are they complicit in making the case weak enough for public dismissal.?
Am I wrong? This is simply my understanding for liability.
So you must prove you at least tried.
Compare with Pavel Durov.
>"Her decision does not affect related claims against Meta itself."
Does not smell right in combination with the first statement