Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say
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If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
-Silicon Valley before the 80's
Personally I do somewhere between one and three strikes with companies. Of course I still must use certain things at certain times, but generally a lot of them can be avoided if you develop the habit of looking for other solutions. It's great fun, actually, once you accept the challenge.
It's only a small action, but it's good on a personal level to practice any kind of resisting.
Ideally they could all switch to a different platform but getting everyone in a group to make that switch is difficult.
My point is that social networks and real-world interaction aren't exclusive. These products facilitate a lot of real-world social interaction as well, and the network effect of most people having an account there makes it hard to move away from.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
- who provides your utilities?
- who provides your food, medications, other stuff that goes in your body?
- where do you get financial services, insurance, etc?
- do you drive? who made your car? do you ever fly?
For many of these categories there are likely a few examples of local governments, co-ops, or mid-size/small companies offering in some of these categories, but not in a comprehensive way -- i.e. you can get some of your food from a local CSA but likely not your whole diet, you might get much of your medical care from a Direct Primary Care model until you need something that's outside of their capacities, etc.
It's pretty sensible. You wouldn't advise people the opposite, would you?
If the behavior is identical between party A who uses the insulin but somehow doesn't "trust" the producer, and party B who both uses it and "trusts" the producer, what has party A achieved through their mistrust?
So even though there exist people at Facebook that have human attributes of empathy and "let's not fuck up half of society" – as a company, they don't behave that way, since it affects more abstract non-human concepts like the survival of the organization, or profit motives that are detached from individuals (like an employee's stock price or yearly bonuses).
I've seen acquaintances share fact sheets about times when drug makers were sued/fined for lying to the FDA, harming customers, manipulating prices, etc. All true! So people reasonably ask why they should be "forced" to have their products injected into them. And then they can get into all the reasons not to trust the FDA too...
Logically, just because a company has done some bad things doesn't mean their vaccines are unsafe. Or that the risks are worse than the disease. Or that sometimes mistakes just happen. And of course in their own lives people are hypocrites, break rules, do things like go back to cheating partners, etc.
I don't have a point here except to lament that things are complicated. Of course people are looking for justification of their beliefs. But maybe we should have held these companies to higher standards, and by allowing them to persist we were unwittingly eroding public trust to a tipping point that is now putting all of us at risk.
Vaccine manufacturers are not special. They are for-profit corporations, and the importance of the product they make gives them tremendous power.
For example take a look at Hep B vaccination. I spent hours one night trying to dig up primary source material and research from the 70s to justify it and the 3-course recommendation. It's obvious that Hep B is a serious illness for babies that can lead the problems much later in life, we know that. But how prevalent was it in the USA before the standard vaccine schedule was rolled out? Has anyone actually gone and looked through VAERS over the past 40 years and compared the rate of serious side effects like GB to a counterfactual base rate of Hep B? That's not a trivial statistics project, and nobody that I'm aware of has done it (although I'm bad at searching), yet we continue to vaccinate every single baby with 3 courses of Hep B. It's probably not a big deal, and I'm willing to believe that the people at the CDC probably know what they're doing (pre-2024) and have/had access to the right data and the right decision-making tools to set a good vaccine schedule. But if it came out that Hep B vaccination actually wasn't all that useful and we should probably stop doing it, it would certainly be inconvenient for the vaccine manufacturer. So there is absolutely an incentive to steer legitimate scientific inquiry toward some directions and away from directions.
All that is to say, trusting the science and being a supporter of evidence-based public health requires skepticism, precisely because for-profit corporations are always going to act like for-profit corporations regardless of what business they are in.
I mean, of course we don't trust big corporations.
It couldn't possibly be because developers in general have proved themselves untrustworthy as well... right?
It couldn't possibly be because users have proven education and countless warnings are ineffective... right?
Common sense outside of our HN bubble says that if merely serving me food is regulated, if merely giving me a haircut requires registration and licensing, why is building apps that can steal my data, my money, and my reputation... not regulated? Surely, it's easier for most people to discern the quality of their food, or the quality of a barber, than an app! Yet even for food, and freaking haircuts, we societally don't trust people to understand warnings and use common sense. Either fix tech (even with laws that make HN furious)... or say those laws regarding haircuts are stupid too.
One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
In my home state, unlicensed barbering is up to $2,000 per incident. So sure, nothing is stopping you. Just as even now, nothing is stopping you from installing a custom ROM and running your own code, even if you might not be able to run other people's code.
> One difference here is the tool that you own is built to undermine your authority and instead do whatever Google says. It'd be like if scissors required biometric validation with Great Clips to open "to protect people from unlicensed haircutters".
This is also a thing in the real world; it's licensing to be able to purchase key fob reprogrammers. It's a real pain, even if the tools (illegally) end up on eBay. That's because the risk of a potentially stolen car is seen as extremely high... but an app's potential makes that look quaint.
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
The horizon is in mortar range. Like 10 km at 10m elevation of the observer.
The horizon is not very far usually.
I may have overestimated the maximum range even then, but the core point was that you need computer assistance even for relatively short distances on the ground, let alone in space.
Or maybe the old adage of "a station wagon hurtling down the highway has more bandwidth than the biggest network links" would apply here -- send little storage modules at warp speed around the universe.
But also, in the show, they have clearly solved this problem, given that they can be out in Beta quadrant and still have live conversations with Starfleet back in San Francisco.
Don’t they also have ways of sending messages wirelessly in real time, just bounded by speed of light? That’s a down-sight lot better than what we have now as we basically just blast radio signals in all directions at roughly the speed of light- which degrades very rapidly over distance.
I’m coloured largely by Voyager, but I don’t see any technology that we have now that they don’t have, not at the distances it would need to work at and without the infrastructure to make it work.
Honestly, I don't know what the conversation is about either.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
Tobacco has zero utilities, meanwhile Facebook is heavily used for connecting families and sharing small life events.
Saying it is the same as Tobacco isn't useful. It's an exaggeration, which makes it hard to take the argument seriously.
I don't see social media being a whole lot more useful. Cool you can share some photos, and organize some events, but you can do that without Facebook and all the unnecessary shit that goes along with it.
It's pretty obvious that they surface rage-bait content on purpose, for example.
Self-regulation is a complete and utter joke.
You dont have to bury the report if it is never written. The only reason you would write it is if you think you are actually doing gods work, think you can whitewash it and manipulate the outcome to say you are or you are grossly incompetent.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
e) the product records a window on behalf of each customer, and the customer can report an incident like this to both Meta and legal authorities including such a recording. Strangers who sexually proposition kids get removed from the platform and may face legal consequences. The virtual space is like a public physical space where anyone else can report your crimes.
If this were a physical space (e.g. a park?) and your pre-teen kids were able to hang out there, the analogs to a-c would all sound crazy. Being carded upon entry to a park, or knowing that everything you say there will be monitored by a central authority would both be really weird. Saying "parents must watch their kids" seems less practical in a VR space where you can't necessarily just keep line-of-sight to your kids.
It's like saying Amazon's business is not scalable because they need warehouse workers.
This is the whole point. Amazon had to hire hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers to scale. They have 1.5 million employees. Facebook is capable of doing the same. The idea that they "can't scale" if they have to stop unloading their negative externalities is absurd. Amazon scaled, while hiring 1.5 million employees. Meta can scale and do the same.
1. With aggressive, noisy referrals to prosecution, and banning people who report others in bad faith, can you get these people to stop approaching kids on the platform? Can you get the human review burden to a tractable level b/c the rate of real issues and the rate of false reports is sufficiently low?
2. Can better moderation / safety measures _facilitate_ growth b/c people won't be scared or disgusted away from your product? We have plenty of people whose advice is "don't let your kids use their products unsupervised" and assuming you don't have the free time to _watch_ your kids use their product that quickly turns into "don't let your kids use their products". A safe platform that people _believe_ is safe might experience faster growth.
2. I don't think the scalability issues are related to the size of the social network, so I don't think this is ever a relevant question, at least from my perspective. My point is that it would not be commercially reasonable for Meta to actually employ the number of people required to run down, verify and then forward reports.
Sorry, but from my point of view, they serve pedos to police on a silver platter. If the police don't take action, that's not Facebook's fault.
That's a bit of a strawman. I've never seen it suggested that the problem is that govts do not prosecute enough of what Facebook reports and that is why so much of it happens on Facebook. I certainly wasn't making that suggestion. My point is that a lot of child solicitation does happen on Facebook. Despite phone verification, so I'm not sure what point you are really making. It seems more like you are coming about it from an abstract privacy perspective, which is valid, but not what you are claiming. Facebook is an oasis for pedos. They are all over Facebook and Instagram trying to interact with kids. Plenty of articles about it and how meta takes very few if any simple precautionary steps, and sometimes even connects these people through the applications of its social algorithms. You are acting like children hang out on the dark web or something. They don't. They are on Facebook. They are on Instagram, YouTube and on video games.
How odd, I wonder if there's a reason for that.
I remember in one transparency report, FB itself sent over 12 million referrals to NCMEC, yet we don't see stories about all those being rounded up for justice
How. Odd.
This is what legislators are generally going for; but it turns out there’s plenty of other stuff on the Internet deserving age restrictions by the same logic.
I’m at the point where I know we’re not going back; that battle is already lost. The question is how to implement it in the most privacy preserving manner.
I’m also at the point where I believe the harm to children exceeds, and is exceeding, the harm of losing a more open internet. Kids are online now, parental controls are little used and don’t work, that’s our new reality.
For anyone who responds this is a “think of the children,” that ignores we have tons of laws thinking about the children, because sometimes you do need to think of the children. One glance at teen’s mental health right now proves that this is one of those times. Telling parents to do better after a decade of trying is not a realistic solution.
My friends with healthy attachments to social media had healthy and present parents. You have to make sure your kid doesn’t want to drop out of society by being too overbearing, and obviously you need to be there to tell them the pitfalls of addiction and superficiality that only experience can reveal. Walking this line every day while your kid is kicking and screaming at you is way harder if you’ve already been kicked and screamed at work for 8 hours, so you just put them on the iPad and hope for the best -> and that’s how we get here. It begins and ends with capitalism’s productivity fetish
If parents only had to work 20 hours… watch half care more about their kids, while the other half gets a second job anyway to buy a boat, or immediately goes into an addiction spiral, their job previously being the time restraint. The jobs that keep us from our hobbies, are also checks on the darker sides of human nature.
On that note, even this doesn’t fix the problem; as now the iPad is still an all-or-nothing device, unless the parent knows how to fluently manage multiple endpoints on multiple operating systems - and this is so universal the law can safely consider it handled. I think that’s less likely to work than a genocide-free communist state.
The reason your argument is wrong is because it’s a restatement of Hobbes, who is a pessimist and can be refuted in many many many ways. Moreover it ignores the very real economic reality that many parents face, which is simply that they have less money or time to provide quality care for their children than they did before, and that’s evidenced by the rising wealth inequality among iPad-owning populations.
I do agree that parents can sometimes be unequipped to raise children, but you seem to be saying that decreasing the amount of work they have to do outside of raising children would make it harder for them to raise well and I can’t really agree with that.
How is it that nobody in this industry knows how codenames work? You're supposed to pick them randomly off a list, not choose veiled references to the actual subject.
> The project was code-named “Project Horton,” for the Dr. Seuss book “Horton Hears a Who!” in which a character tries to protect small people from others who attempt to harm them, according to the youth researcher.
No, Facebook, stop it.
(Occasionally of course this gets _coincidentally_ violated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peacock#Chicken-powered_n... - the proposed weapon was called Blue Peacock _before_ the chickens were proposed)
For me it’s stuff like this.
I'm on HN and Bluesky. I have a Reddit account I can manually log into if there's something important (but I deleted my login credentials from my browser after the 2023 boycott and rarely post now). I wish I had access to Marketplace sometimes, but enough people still post to Craigslist. If you offered me some cash, equivalent to the amount I've overpaid for stuff because I didn't have Marketplace, to reduce my quality of life with the misery that Facebook once inflicted, I'd laugh in your face. I have no Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or any of the rest.
Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email. Yeah, I have Signal and Telegram, but few contacts that use either. I have a Discord with a few servers, but I'm not on the mobile app - I intentionally only use it from my PC. Yes, there are a handful of organizations in my periphery which only post on Facebook Groups and which only communicate by Facebook Messenger, I'm out of the loop with those orgs, but most are understanding when I explain that I don't have Facebook. If I click a link to their pages and try to view comments or pictures, Facebook constantly advertises that I need to create an account because life's better on Facebook - but I know better.
Stop waiting for someone else to upend a trillion dollar industry that literally defines network effects and which isn't aligned with what's best for you. Disrupt your social media addiction yourself!
There will be a few weeks of adjustment as your brain struggles through withdrawal of the easy dopamine habit. Don't give in, when you recognize the impulse, just choose to do something better: go for a walk, read a book, volunteer with a local organization doing good work, pick up a new habit you can be proud of.
"You don't have Facebook?, well your a red flag" and that hurts when your trying to connect. I now look back and am I glad that no data of mine really exists on the platform.
My twenties and university I've missed out on parties, arrangements, opportunities for not having access to groups. Facebook forces you in to their walled garden; disallows & scalds you from sharing anything outside.
Shops use Facebook/WhatsApp and I am unable to access their pages. Should I boycott my local organic grocery store because of my own anarchy? Customer support for some large main-high street chains first point of call of contact is via WhatsAp, unhelpful if I need to chase up a refund.
My family only have a signal group only because of me. They all default back to WhatsApp, Instagram and the rest because that's where their contacts are. I have no right to tell them not too.
CraigsList isn't really thing here, Gumtree works, but not as efficient as market place.
Deleting your account leaves you heavily isolated and if you can deal with that; great. With doing so, you however miss out on a lot of stuff and receive not many perks in return. Other than your data isn't being combed to manipulate and poison others.
FOMO becomes real.
> Actual friends and family can keep in touch with me IRL, over SMS, by phone calls, or by email
My actual friends, live in the foreign countries so IRL isn't possible. SMS and Phone calls are expensive. I use a iPhone and they use Android. Apple/Android integration has only just become available but people don't want that.
I've tried to onboard them but the mindshare of what WhatsApp gives doesn't match those to of Signal or Element; it's seen as a chore. Discord has some things right and as much as I loathe it, it has been the "one-fits-all" but definitely not suitable for my 70 year old something mother.
It's a nice ideology "just delete" but it's flawed concept when the whole world uses the technology you're trying to escape from. MySpace was perfect and I didn't need anything else.
In my life I call this "dodging a bullet". It hurts for a little bit but it's just a flesh wound.
Retrospectively I am way over it, twenties is always emotional driven. Facebook was new and everyone flocked to it like sheep. So what can you expect.
I saw this all unfolding at the time as it is now. Watching the decay of it all is the perk in return I guess.
IMO that's the problem, you fully submit to these platforms controlling what you know of.
To the lurkers: If you live in a big enough city, look for local nexuses of people doing good social work and volunteer. Social media is too divorced from reality and the satisfaction of helping improve your community should naturally lead you into the finding cool people in your area. Tool libraries, food kitchens, park cleanup crews, cycling groups, cultural preservation groups, maker spaces, church groups if applicable/compatible, stuff like this. And try to have a calm, humble, accepting attitude.
It's interesting that market forces spur such growth but they also eventually spoil those fruits.
I use private chats to talk to people that matter to me, about topics we both care about. I don't care to replace that. I don't see any reason to have true social media (and not pseudonymous message boards like this site) in my life.
Front Porch Forum is one example of a relatively good social network. It's made possible by the founders not aiming to become billionaires. This is another necessary property of basically anything good.
Maybe it's regional and I just happen to be in a FB-heavy region, or it's dying in the cities but still useful in small towns and rural areas, but it's doing fine here.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
If you want the largest businesses in the world to be responsible for the harm they bring to society, you need to make sure the management and profit motives are both aligned with taking on that responsibility. The more responsible companies of the world axiomatically don't get to be the biggest, because they will be outcompeted by the companies that choose to not be responsible.
Only difference is that Meta has the means to produce a non-toxic product but chooses toxicity.
Don't worry, Zuckerberg to invest countless billions into the USA market, so the toxicity will be welcomed with open arms by those in power to stop it.
Or Monsanto. Or GM / Ethyl Corp. Or Purdue. Or...
Purdue is a pretty close match I think: they didn't have to be completely bereft of ethics and actively harmful to society, they chose to.
The fact that we would prioritize a business' constant growth over the impact to child safety is garbage. This argument, this sentiment... they need to die.
For instance, in 2009 Pfizer was fined $2.3B for promoting off-label use of a few drugs and paying kickbacks to health care providers to push them. That year they reported $50B in revenues, so the largest health care settlement in history (at the time) probably didn't even put them in the red.
If fines for law-breaking by corporations were large enough to bankrupt the company, and if executives did prison time as well, that would be an actual incentive to obey the laws.
In 2018 Rick Scott was elected as a US Senator for Florida and now serves on the budget committee. That is, CEO responsible for a huge theft of taxpayer money is now in charge of how all the taxes are spent.
I think this is incredibly short sighted and not the case at all.
(Not you, but companies that think this way.)
Facebook started out doing something great and free. People loved it.
They couldn't stay all free, but if they had aimed at continuing to enable people, while maintaining their privacy (from third parties, and themselves), they could have been a platform of tremendous creativity and productivity. With an entire sub-economy of trustworthy paid networked upgrades and services.
The social network has tremendous value, with high value opportunities in every direction.
But instead of looking out for the users, they went with surveillance, manipulation and slop (Political, social, AI, ... slop.) And now 99.99% of what their servers do is that.
So today, yes, their survival is completely dependent on digging deeper. But they had a choice. Now they don't.
On the one hand, they would take a catastrophic capitalization plunge if they discovered ethics. On the other hand, they have become global experts at hyper-scaling and leveraging conflicts of interest, and dodging any meaningful repercussions.
And, they were especially insulted from competitive threats thanks to the huge advantage of network effects!
But businesses are always going to fuck up and have flawed leaders! And I think that was the general point. Social media has turned out to be a major educational moment for society in a lot of regards.
Can you name one gigantic, publicly-traded company that made a choice similar to what you described and reaped the rewards on that scale?
The fact that these services need to be not just profitable, but also sustain indefinite growth makes them desperate. All of them start squeezing their customers for cash, be it directly (predatory pricing, subscription services, segmenting their services, raising prices) or indirectly (selling user data, integrating everything they know into their ad services, using harmful techniques to maximize engagement). Personal attitudes just dictate whether it happens earlier or later, but they all will have to do it.
Tech companies seem to have converged on the idea that providing a compromised, but free service is usually superior to anything paid. And it seems to have paid off, Facebook has billions of users to this day. Most people don't care or don't like to think about it. The fix for this would need to be systemic.
But Meta/Facebook is not a human being. It is a corporate being, composed mostly of humans with some computers and internal processes and external regulations... but at scale, it is not like a human.
Do not anthropomorphize the corporate being.
Increasingly automated large and (financially) efficient businesses are proving that they are not able to be steered by individuals making personal moral decisions. An individual has some autonomy to direct their own work in a given direction, but at the scale of a 1.9 trillion dollar company, those individual choices are far less important than the legal and fiscal frameworks that create incentives and penalties for various actions.
The corporate being exists to make money. It's a super-organism, with an ecology of power structures and internal competitions that continuously work to improve its ability to make money. Opportunities to raise a moral concern that will cause it to make less money do not survive in this environment. It has a limited capacity for forward planning, looking at an issue like negative PR for harms to child safety and applying pressure to avoid that local minimum, but mostly it optimizes for quarterly ROI.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...
Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.
Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.
Marc Benioff has done the same thing:
https://www.hawaiifreepress.com/Articles-Main/ID/40583/Clima...
“When you have the locals getting priced out of towns like this and more challenges with people moving over here, it just creates more competition in terms of trying to buy land,” one local resident told NPR anonymously. “At what point does Hawaii not become Hawaii anymore, if no Hawaiians are here?”
Obviously there were some youthful things that looked bad, and they came back up under scrutiny. Though who hasn't said things that sounded bad, or made mistakes that they regret and wouldn't make again.
Years ago, I saw him and his wife on the street, and they just seemed normal, no evil aura. I would guess that maybe his wife has been a relatively positive influence, and at least took the edge off of whatever influences may have been involved in earlier mistakes.
Of course, now it's presumably not just earlier influences, and those of current friends and family, but also the influences that tend to happen with wealth and power. I haven't paid enough attention to know whether or how much wealth and power affected Zuckerberg in particular, but I default assume it's a risk with anyone in such a position.
I've also started to wonder about side effects of whatever health supplements that a lot of the newly-buff tech billionaires seem to be taking. For example, are some decisions and scandals actually steroid-influenced? (And, for at least one of the other billionaires, there's also non-health drugs, combined with chronic sleep deficit, which can't be good for the individual, nor for anyone under their power.)
Maybe if they were smaller and scrappier. They're big enough now that they can just purchase any viable competition and turn it into profit-maximizing sludge. But that's just the free market at work, baby!
Yes keeping things ethical and legal harms growth. Or otherwise said, absent enforcement, dishonest, unethical and illegal operations grow faster and eventually kill honest legal competition.
That is WHY we need laws and enforcement. That is why it is necessary to complain and punish executives and bad actors companies.
Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently
No, that is not the point being raised by the majority of the “fiduciary duty” defenders. But even if we concede that’s what some are arguing for, that is such a bizarre stance to take: “we want the same thing, and but I’ll criticise you and shill in defense of the CEO because the way you’re doing it isn’t extreme enough”. That is absurd and it makes no sense to think the person criticising the CEO doesn’t also realise that more robust systemic change is desired and necessary. But you can’t do that all at once.
We let far too many people get away with the fiduciary duty defense for abhorrent behavior.
Acting in the interest of shareholders is an incredibly broad set of behaviors, up to and including foregoing profits for social and moral causes.
Assuming you meant incentives, how about collecting fines in voting shares?
Social needs is a nebulous enough term that it outright scares me imagining what twisted definitions of it would arise naturally from sincere attempts to promote it, let alone cynical abuses. Imagine a religious fundamentalist defining 'social needs'. Horrors like 'we should work to keep kids in the closet for social cohesion' and honestly thinking that it is the right thing to do.
A concern with social rights is a step up from narrow concern with economic rights, since it enables the rich to just oppress everyone else. At least you can contest things instead of being ruled dicatorially by the market.
Meta, tobacco, etc companies are stuck being unable to change their basic product and that product being inherently harmful.
Meta's customers are advertisers, not users. User harm is collateral damage of providing the advertiser with attention. Just like car companies care much more about protecting the driver rather than the pedestrian the car might just hit.
Whom Meta serve so well that Meta have shown me adverts for things I cannot buy because I have the wrong gender, location, nationality, or that I just don't understand because I don't speak the language in which the advert was written.
Advertisers also want protection from negative associations. Which is why many types of YouTube videos get demonetized for example, but good look getting that level of protection on Facebook.
As to pedestrian safety, that is on the mind of car manufacturers. Backup cameras for example have significantly reduced the number of pedestrians struck while backing up. In part that’s because it’s the drivers family members at risk, but there’s also concerns around lawsuits etc.
It’s just a huge criminal enterprise.
isn't it common story that such car features are not implemented until testing organizations introduce new tests?
This was decades before laws requiring seatbelts became a thing.
Toyota offered a ton (20,000+) of EV power train related patents for free in 2019, with the stated goal of combating climate change. Tesla did someone similar in 2014.
There’s a surprising number of such cases over time.
Also culture. I'm not saying things were perfect in the past, but introduction of the "Friedman doctrine" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine) to business culture probably made things much worse:
> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman that holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible.
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine has been very influential in the corporate world from the 1980s to the 2000s
> ...
> In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman had argued that when companies concern themselves with the community rather than profit it leads to corporatism,[6] consistent with his statement in the first paragraph of the 1970 essay that "businessmen" with a social conscience "are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society".[2]
> ...
> Shareholder theory has had a significant impact in the corporate world.[8] In 2016, The Economist called shareholder theory "the biggest idea in business", stating "today shareholder value rules business".[9] In 2017, Harvard Business School professors Joseph L. Bower and Lynn S. Paine stated that maximizing shareholder value "is now pervasive in the financial community and much of the business world. It has led to a set of behaviors by many actors on a wide range of topics, from performance measurement and executive compensation to shareholder rights, the role of directors, and corporate responsibility."[7]
> ...
> The Friedman doctrine is controversial,[1] with critics variously saying it is wrong on financial, economic, legal, social, or moral grounds.[14][15]
> It has been criticized by proponents of the stakeholder theory, who believe the Friedman doctrine is inconsistent with the idea of corporate social responsibility to a variety of stakeholders.[16] They argue it is morally imperative that a business takes into account all of the people who are affected by its decisions.
I hate to prove Godwin's law but jfc that sounds like "just following orders".
I think incentivizing company executives with stock performance based pay really amplifies the amoral profit seeking behavior of large corporations.
In a better world executives would consider holistic shareholder welfare - "would our shareholders truly be better off if we took <society-destroying-action>?" - instead of mere shareholder value. They'd take home a handsome, but not exorbitant, salary. They would do the job because it's one of the top, most prestigious jobs in the field they've dedicated their lives to. Not because they can make obscene wealth by gaming some numbers.
"Increase shareholder value" ... yeah until the company subsumes the planet... duh, so natural and rational. And obviously if you act that way forever it won't ever effect shareholder value. It's so stupid of a theory it's basically a non-statement. It's utterly obvious that companies want to make money and obvious that stakeholders want that too. This theory is just saying that goodwill is worthless but like, clearly it's not. Apple didn't have to make it's products beautiful, but it did, because it's cool.
But the change is not just cultural, after Friedman et al. came a wave of deregulation and changes in the tax system. Deregulation that allows businesses to get away with bad business practices, and a tax system that resulted in the skyrocketing of CEO pay. CEOs became not just well-paid employees anymore, but actual part of the shareholder class.
We need to at least get back to post-war capitalism where businesses were more regulated, the tax system was progressive, and the economy grew more than ever.
Expecting a company, public or private, to behave morally and with a long-term human vision is setting yourself up for endless disappointment.
As in addiction treatment, the first step is admitting the problem.
Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
When they declared corporations to be people, I wish they would have specified it to be sociopathic people.
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
How it's going: "Meta suppressed research on child safety"
I'm sorry but at this point, Meta is just the lawnmower, you can't even be mad at it. We know what it is, and we always should have known based on what it told us about itself. That we continue to allow it to operate this way is an indictment of our culture, not Meta.
Is the fox made up of sentient humans with an ethical and moral obligation to other humans? Then absolutely.
You can argue that's not sufficient to get the fox to change its behavior, but pretending it's an unthinking animal or force of nature is silly.
If my actions have 0 impact on its behavior then treating it this way is my only sane option. I can, however, build a fence.
Unfortunately there's a real shortage of non-amoral actors at the moment.
What should be happening is our government should be doing this research and shutting down corporations that prey on and harm children. Instead our government protects people who prey on and harm children. And yes, that extends to corporate people. If you want something to change, fix the problem. Meta is not the problem.
have you ever considered the possibility that maybe the widespread total abandonment of ethical and moral norms and standards is the actual problem, and figuring out how to adequately punish the mass violation of ethics is downstream of that?
Meta is the problem. Tolerating Meta is equally the problem, but it doesn’t make Meta not the problem.
If Meta or DuPont didn't exist, someone else would've done similar if not worse things. The issue isn't just personal flaws within specific companies, the issue is that we reward businesses that do these things. Either way we'd self-select to a set of equally abusive companies. The solution isn't just punishing Meta, it's changing the rules to make Meta's practices deeply unprofitable, and/or making profit not be the most important thing in the universe.
And they need to have actual responsibility for what they order the company to do amd for what it does.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
We're not in the esotherics of subtle moral philosophy here.
Revert the UI to how it looked 10 years ago, remove the recommendation algorithm, and probably a few other improvements would be quite welcome.
Have you seen recent US governments?
I really fail to see why a mid-sized government would be incapable of providing basic email service.
we had an agency that was actually doing this, and fairly well by most accounts. it was shut down by the Trump administration.
never forget that we can have nice things, if we don't let people take them away from us.
Be careful what you wish for!
Quite a few of the other presidents, likewise.
https://www.npr.org/2022/04/19/1093364807/republicans-confro...
And the church the right is so fond of sure seems to have its own wiki page on child safety. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_sexual_abuse_c...
Of course Zuck, who's famous for ass kissing the orange stain that calls himself a president https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnGSYvEC-DQ (and who LOOOVES his daughter a little bit too much https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EPEkk6qWkg), would want to suppress child safety research, his benefactors demand it.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
This is just blatant top down enforcement. It's not a "culture". It's the decrees of the executives and the leadership.
It's useful data to have, even if they don't care about right and wrong.
Society is breaking down in part because of it.
America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.
Edit: For the reply, about "Mastodon is not a company but many independent actors"...
Who on earth is making sure those independent actors don't do... any of that? If Mastodon gets large enough, don't be surprised when the largest instances start doing exactly that.
Built a screentime app to automatically block after chosen number of mins and it’s helping me. Completely free to try: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nomo-reduce-screen-time/id6748...
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
Zuck: Just ask.
Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
Zuck: People just submitted it.
Zuck: I don't know why.
Zuck: They "trust me"
Zuck: Dumb fucks.
Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
[0] https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
> Zuck: Just ask.
> Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS
> [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?
> Zuck: People just submitted it.
> Zuck: I don't know why.
> Zuck: They "trust me"
> Zuck: Dumb fucks.
> Mark Zuckerberg, 2004
The sad thing is, he was totally right. The Zuck gets none of my data.
If they want to give their children devices to use unsupervised, then they should block access to whatever they deem harmful.
The only thing it achieves is ever growing helicopter parenting and related anxieties ... while the same people who complained about parents not controlling everything complain when they try.
We expect shops and passerbys to not sell porn or steal from kids in real life.
Now imagine all government restrictions on these are removed, and there is a store within walking distance of your house that is staffed by employees that will willingly, without question, sell these items to your kids and their friends? Is it still all on the parents to prevent access?
What about if this store has advertisements specifically targeted toward children? Or has discounts on cigarettes/alcohol/... aimed at the lower age brackets? "First pack free if you're under 18".
Now put this "store" on the internet, accessible from your kid's cellular device.
There's a spectrum here.
Yes. When a child is too young, parents should be directly preventing access to those vices. As their children get older, parents should have instilled enough values into their children that constant surveillance is no longer required.
And there absolutely isn't consensus on when it's harmful to give children alcohol. Many would say it's good to give a child a glass of wine at a family dinner so that they learn to drink responsibly.
Msot agree that cigarettes are harmful at all ages, so that's not really relevant.
I never had access to cable television or video games growing up, while nearly all my classmates did. It wasn't a big deal.
I'll give you a hard reason of which you must not be aware: it actually takes two parents to have a child.
Think about why that's important. If one parent is too addicted to their own usage of Instagram, and models that for the kids, the kids will pull that towards them, no matter what the other parent does.
You cannot monitor children constantly, unless you are are, say, a billionaire tech executive who has willingly ignored all data to show that his products have damaged society and children in pursuit of personal profit.
There is only one person in the world that can afford to do what you suggest, and his initials are MZ.
Absolutely, I would have been fine with the stock not growing as fast (it would still have grown, Meta has billions of users), as would every single one of the IC's I regularly worked with.
You are also creating a contorted argument to hold onto your blame, making a bonfire out of your credibility. Which is possibly why you are using a new account?
- Enabled genocide in Myanmar https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- Literally pirated books to train their trash AI LLM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- Violated human rights for Palestinians (even in 2021: https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-pale...)
- Interfered in British politics with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, one of the costliest and stupidest mistakes in UK's history (full of stupid and costly mistakes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- The CEO of the company is famous for ass-kissing even dumber people than himself e.g: Trump https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
What else do you expect from the trashiest company in the world. Of course they don't care for child safety.
I’m just saying that some companies might release more information if the reaction wasn’t always adversarial. It’s not just meta. There’s a constant demand for outrage against big companies.
Some of those reactions on that spectrum would lead to greater human flourishing and well-being, others of those reactions would lead to the opposite. Now think about the reaction they actually _did_ have. Where on the aforementioned spectrum would their actual reaction fall?
Zooming out, how have they reacted to similar circumstances in the past when their own internal research or data indicated a negative impact on people?
The continued "outrage" is that they've exhibited a recurrent pattern across myriad occurrences.
It's also worth pointing out this comes hot on the heels of the internal ai chatbot <> children memo leak [1] so people might not be likely to give them the benefit of the doubt atm...
Who doesn't like these?