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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth? What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior? Is any of the management going to jail?

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.

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This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.

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.

> This echoes the past when the tobacco industry performed such tactics.

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.

>From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

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.

You need a much bigger and systemic change than a new CEO for that

I think the comment is saying exactly that "we" need to have regulation that sets the correct priorities, because a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself. The tendency to trade off the common good for individual short term gain is explained by game theory.

But they use their "free speech" in the form of money to lobby and set the agenda for any such regulations. Citizens and public institutions cant possibly compete with that

you never know if you don't try

That's how I took it too. For this to work, the penalties would have to be large enough to make the harmful actions unprofitable for the company (and its executives). Usually, fines given out by government regulators (who are sometimes people who used to work for the industry or will in the future) are small enough to be considered part of the cost of doing business.

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.

Want another rich one? After acquiring HCA in 1994, Rick Scott was CEO of the company while it systematically defrauded the US government by overcharging Medicaid and various other schemes. In settlements reached in 2000 and 2002, Columbia/HCA pleaded guilty to 14 felonies and agreed to a $600+ million fine, which was the largest health care fraud settlement in U.S. history at the time.

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.

> a profit-motivated business/market cannot do so itself

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.

I agree that Facebook could have continued to become something better, and the failure to do so is a direct result of Zuck's own personal flaws and failures and the culture he spawned.

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.

What makes you so confident that this alternate path is actually real and as good as you describe it? You say that the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost, but what makes you think that? The thing here is that any of these megacorporations has hundreds of people dedicated solely to exploring every conceivable strategy they have to making as much money as possible. So why hasn't even one of them from any company thought of what you said? And why did no one try?

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.

> the additional market coverage they would've gotten by not being abusive could've easily made up for the profit that they otherwise would've lost

I don't think anything would have been easy.

But I do think that if you want to be more than a one trick pony, as Meta desperately does, the best bet is leaning into creating value. Getting better and better at that. From whatever unique position you start with.

There is more potential value to create than extract.

Watching Zuck's VR and AI initiatives. It is clear he hasn't a clue, has no unique insights, into what would be useful or non-trivially engaging.

His big vision is to create bigger milking machines. Even before creating something worthy of being milked. Even for a predator, that puts the cart before the hyena.

Your quoted sentence explicitly says "from a business perspective". No human being would prioritize constant growth over harming children. "No" meaning the overwhelming majority of human beings, including those employed at Facebook, ignoring a handful of sociopaths who are going to raise stupid objections like "but I don't have kids" or "but I'm not a kid" or "what if those kids are part of an outgroup to me"/

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.

I wonder if Zuck has always been this unethical or if he’s grown into it more through the years. Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.

Remember Facebook’s original use? I guess that’s an answer.

yeah but I consider that more weird / pathetic vs this which is blatantly anti-ethical

They have one goal: $$

Haven’t we learned that ethics are subjective.

I’m struggling to see a subjective version of this that is ethical?

Profit maximizing sure but that’s not ethical if you’re knowingly harming others. So I guess you’re helping your shareholders which is the ethical thing to do since the benefit to them outweighs the harm to the kids?

A lot of people failed to see Hitler’s point of view as well. That didn’t stop the trains though.

One can never tell what twisted logic they’re using to justify their actions.

I think this reflects on a lifetime of highlighting "think of the children" versus abusing women, stalking, etc. being swept under the rug. "Creepy" behaviour towards someone can actually deprive them of a sense of safety and cause permanent harm. As a culture we downplay that as weird or silly instead of scary and invasive.

A house built on weak foundation is bound to fall, or at least tilt.

Zuck was known to log the passwords from failed login attempts and then secretly use these passwords to log into their emails.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/99tnok/til_t...

Yes, the chap is a real piece of work.

O man I forgot about that one. True class.

Why was this post deleted and labeled "(R.5) Misleading"? Do you have the original source?

I'm pretty sure he's always been.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/

Given that Zuckerberg is a public figure with a lot of power over the world, and there's some scandals at least on his watch, I suppose that some speculation about relevant aspects of private life is appropriate.

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.)

>> Even in the personal domain he seems horrible eg stealing Kauai birthright land for his mega mansion.

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?”

O nice did he also sue people to steal their Kuleana land? Classic billionaire move.

> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

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!

Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014) being prime examples

> From a business perspective, wouldn't taking these issues seriously harm growth?

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.

This is why it blows my mind how anybody can actually believe privatizing healthcare, or schools, or any public good can possibly be a good idea. Like have they see the shit for-profit companies have done? It’s like they are living in a different world.

It’s probably because they’ve seen the shit that government has done. The problem ends up being not who does it, but how much power they have.

At this point, private companies have more power than some governments. How long before we are back to company towns with private security forces? We are trading elected officials, who may be corrupt, with unelected officials, who are corrupt by design.

If you mean Trump and republicans, yes. But majority of harm they cause currently consists of destroying what worked quite well.

Being the owner of a business does not exempt you from being a human being. Ethics apply. A person is more valuable than a company.

History has unequivocally proven that the majority of big business leaders don’t give a shit about ethics. In fact, they will come up with whole new ideologies to justify their behavior (see effective altruism).

It’s worrying that we have to keep repeating this so often. The amount of people defending abhorrent behaviour with a version of “the CEO has a fiduciary duty to shareholders” boggles the mind.

Especially in the case of Meta when Zuck has set up share structure to give him majority control as long as he's alive and doesn't sell. He's about the only exec out there of a public company that doesn't have to answer to anyone else and can do the more ethical but less profitable thing. It's not like Meta at half its current share value and Zuck with "only" $130 billion net worth instead of his current $260 billion doesn't leave a viable company and perfectly good lifestyle for him and his family and whatever else he cares about.

The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).

Appealing without any leverage is a losing game and describes where we are at currently

> The point is that we should seek more robust systemic change than petitioning business owners to be better people against their best interests (finance, power).

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.

The wildest thing to me is that reputation in the form of goodwill is an item on the balance sheet. Doing the right thing is very frequently something that can be claimed to be in the long term interest of the shareholders.

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.

Exactly this. Laws would need to change from the sole goal of maximizing shareholder profit to balancing profit with social consequences, in order to minimize harm to society. Then, any company that is acting irresponsibly could be sued and eliminated from the market, leaving only the "good" players.

> What sort of fines and punishment are making sure invectives are aligned with good behavior?

Assuming you meant incentives, how about collecting fines in voting shares?

Why don't we simply make sure that workers and the government have major stakes in companies so that incentives are more aligned with social needs?

The people suppressing the research already have major stakes. What is lacking is any consequence for them at all.

They do not have the same stake in a healthy society as the rest of us. I agree with consequences for them, but the entire model is flawed. It is motivating a small number of people to claim as much for themselves as possible with little serious stake holding by the broader society other than other rich people. There has to be more democracy introduced.

That would just spread the corruption around along with the rewards as things which make them more money reward them and things which make less effectively punish them. Not too much of a difference quantitatively for workers (job security is negatively impacted by the company doing poorly). That would mean that the government is basically 'bribing itself' whenever it does anything that is aligned with the company. That is the opposite of what you would want.

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.

Our current political system already privileges these people. What are you worried about with expanded democratic rights? It would counterbalance them.

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.

This mode of thought is absolute cancer.

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