Meta's legal team abandoned its ethical duties | Hacker News Reader

Meta's legal team abandoned its ethical duties

afterbabel.com

272 pointsshrubby214 comments

Ex-facebook employee here: abandoning ethics in facebook didn't start in near past. And it's not only the legal team; engineers and PM team are even worse in this matter.

Only people ready to do "anything" to optimize their performance rating and team goal are successful at facebook. And remember, facebook only hires smart people. So they do know what they are doing.

>facebook only hires smart people

So it is true, they really do only hire insufferable pricks.

"they know what they are doing". Individually? Maybe! I hear Meta pays among the highest, if not the single highest salaries of FAANG.

But as a company? Meta has been entirely incapable to innovate since it was renamed. Betting billions on an obviously flawed idea of a Facebook-owned VR universe, then shortly pivoting to a cryptocurrency that ended up being little more than a rugpull, and, after investing billions in expensive AI staff, they're now pulling the plug on that, too

The most successful products like WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased, not internal developments. Nobody cares about Threads and it mostly only exists because Elon Musk destroyed Twitter.

I sure hope Instagram and WhatsApp are bringing in enough money because Meta is running out of things to do, other than milking their current customers dry.

Do they know what they're doing? Do they really?

It comes across as boorish, on an article about widespread sexual exploitation including children and 17-strike sex trafficking policies, to write a long rant about whether the trillion dollar company has a long-term business strategy that'll give it more power.

That is quite clearly not what they are asserting, discussing, or even adjacent to conversationally.

It doesn't help when you're exaggerating to make it have some foundation, and obviously so. (they pivoted from VR to crypto? pulled the plug on AI?)

The game they’re playing isn’t to make new products or to make the products they have better. They’re playing the game of making the line go up and as much as I dislike them I have to say that they’re being successful

That's fair I guess they really are successful at that.

They could have had their ecosystem if they would have been a little less greedy. I think this was the reason last gen VR wasn't overly successful, despite the advancements. No hackers and enthusiasts were able to do cool stuff with VR hardware because every hardware vendor sucked and nobody was exactly in an nvidia position.

They didn't offer support for devices that were just 1.5 years old. I will never buy any Facebook hardware again, even if the financial loss isn't important to me. It is a matter of respecting the customer.

If you start with enshitification outright, people might just skip your product.

So many companies have devised a system where only sociopaths can get ahead and now a bunch of sociopaths are running them. We're still supposed to be able to hold those psychos accountable for the harms they cause the reset of us. It's not just facebook's lawyers who have abandoned their duties. The government is failing as well and I suspect a large part of that has to do with how comfortable they've gotten with bribery and corruption.

I mean from a privacy perspective alone its clear that Meta throws its ethics out the door in that regard. There's the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the more recent incident with Instagram bypassing Android OS restrictions for more tracking, and many many other examples.

Their apps also regularly nag you to allow access to stuff like contacts and the photo gallery when you've already said no the first time.

And for a personal anecdote: I was recently helping a senior setup Whatsapp Desktop on her Windows computer. It could chat fine but refused to join calls, displaying an error that said there was no microphone connected. I mean, there is a mic connected and it could record voice notes fine. Turns out that error actually meant that there was no webcam connected, and a webcam is required to join calls. I think it's the same way in the mobile app where you need to give it the camera permission to join a video call even if you turn the video off. Meanwhile Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others allow you to join any call without a mic or camera.

As she didn't have a webcam I first tried the OBS virtual camera but Whatsapp refused to recognize that despite all other apps working fine with it. Somehow Droidcam with no phone connected worked fine, displaying a black screen in the virtual camera feed, and that got Whatsapp to join the call successfully. Absolutely ridiculous and it's clear to me how desperately they want that camera access and that sweet data.

See, this is why I made a comment in that Apple thread (see my post history) about stopping Facebook doing things like this. I was told "Android can do it too". Yes but no. Apple may do evil things but they punished Facebook for their bullshit, revoking their certificate. The landscape of contact info (phone numbers, email addresses, social media services, people just submitted it, they trust me, dumb f-) means you can't have bad faith actors like Zuckerberg Zucking about. Whatsapp is such a clear case of antitrust just for starters

Edit: sorry, not entirely clear, I mean we need Apple's system of granularity. "Deny access to contacts" needs to work even when the asking company (Facebook) tries tricking people

I've met ex-Facebook employees who don't see what the fuss is about. I wonder what fraction of them hold that view.

many prefer to remain ignorant about the consequences of their deeds; it helps them sleep better at night.

Probably because they don't allow their own children to use the product.

I would think that fraction is directly related to how much Meta stock they own, and how long they've had it for.

Ethics are for the little people, when your stock holdings grow by several multiples ethics are just hindrances.

I'm thinking about the study by Erich von Holst where few minnows were lobotomised and returned to the shoal.

Afterwards these were returned to the shoal and they started dominating.

Moral development levels by Kohlberg tell a similar story where L1 is the narcissist (Zuck, Trump,...) level. Lobminmows. The current societal level or at least the direction.

L2 is the conventional moral as in the shoal that most of us follow. This level imitates the normal. See Musk as a prime example of the change. You can also revert to L1 by trauma, addiction...

L3 is the post conventional level where you do what's right and can differentiate between normal and right.

So L1 arrested development.

L2 herd moral and narrow empathy. Them vs. us being the right thing.

L3 being universal compassion.

L1 controls the airspace and L2 follows the loudest even though everyone (except the very few who are L1) wants the society to be L3.

So whether we dare to grasp this will decide the faith of our children and also us as the time is running out and the power has concentrated to very few L1.

And IMO the left and the right in the politics are both L2, with minor differences and both have failed us and served L1.

L1 is zillionaire mindset.(Rushkoff and the Mindset) L2 is Banal evil (Hannah Arendt and Banality of Evil) L3 is true ethics or ephics where ethical theory comes to praxis.

Sorry, perhaps bit off-topic but this is fascinating in light of latest news from Greenland and Davos. The current wouldn't have happened though without the help of Zuck, Cambridge Analytica etc.

Anyone interested in learning more about this should read https://theauthoritarians.org/

Thank you. This fits nicely in my Kobo curriculum.

Okay and thanks again.

I started reading this and it seems to be a good summary of what I'm thinking.

The authoritarian right wingers on both sides of the isle and the banal followers of the autoritarians.

I personally don't want companies deciding what is or isn't ethical. That is because a company only has one ethos, make money, so a company's ethics and mine will never line up. I expect every company to be rational which means they will be evil from my point of view. Any system that relies on companies to 'do the right thing' on behalf of people is clearly broken and any push to get them to 'do the right thing' when they don't have to is foolish. This is why we have laws and other checks in the system like journalism. From the article it looks like there is a clear argument that these lawyers broke the law in destroying evidence or purposefully hiding it/. The real issue here is that they, and their clients, aren't being held accountable for it. That is the issue that needs to be vigorously pursued. Why are they protected over people? Dig into that and we may actually make headway on the problem.

If I'm understanding correctly, you seem to propose that companies of people (generally, executives) should not be responsible for ethics, but rather politicians checked by journalists.

Politicians are notorious for their lack of ethics. Journalists have acquiesced to reprinting police reports and political press releases. Assuming someone unfortunately attains legal standing, the court process is so expensive and tedious it remains unaccessible anyway. This is to say nothing of political corruption or the way criminal proceedings work for people like Meta executives versus the general public.

How do you reconcile this dissonance?

I read it as "companies should not be the definition of what is ethical behavior", not your reading of "they should not be responsible for ethics".

I didn't say that politicians and laws are perfect. They are terrible. But the key differences is that I have at least -some- say in politicians while I have 0 say in a company. This is why libertarian philosophy always breaks down for me 'let the free market decide/do whatever' just leads to companies being the de-facto government and individuals having no say. I'll take a flawed system that has some redeeming qualities over a broken system with no redeeming qualities any day.

The current administration has a very low approval rating, but the company at issue has infamously been caught colluding with them [0].

I suppose my concern boils down to the fact that positions like appeals to politicians ends up equating to appeals to empower politicians. This often seems to have the effect of enabling the very big businesses we sought to reign in, and often at the cost of any other alternatives. Rather, I suspect a more productive path would be to seek to remove power from both the Metas of this world and politicians.

[0] “I'm sorry I wasn’t ready ... I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with”

Totally off the topic at hand, but I have never used an LLM to write a comment. What tools do you use here? What have you tried? How much to you integrate it into sites like this?

I'm not sure I understand your questions. I'm in the (apparent minority on HN) anti-LLM camp, so none. I'm just someone who was sentient in the 90s and has seen history slip down all the slippery slope fallacies despite assurances that they were fallacies.

You're repeating the article's position, while presenting as heartily disagreeing with it, and presenting that its position is "companies alone should decide ethics"

That is a valid criticism. My tone was a bit combative even though I am largely supporting the article's conclusions. What I was targeting though was the idea of an ethical duty by the lawyers or the company. The title, 'Meta's Legal Team Abandoned Its Ethical Duties' makes it clear what their central idea is even though they discuss actions later that my position, and theirs, would both agree should happen. I think this concept, that they had an ethical duty, is a core issue and leads to the position we are in. As the article points out, there was a change in the ethics of big lawyers that have led to companies like Meta considering it possible to take these tactics. The very idea that lawyers and companies can and should be ethical implies that everyone's ethics are the same which is obviously false and leads to justifications in boardrooms that should instead be clear-cut discussions of legality from the start. If we argue that meta's lawyers should be held accountable for ethics violations and not legal ones then we are stepping on very unsteady ground since they can, rightfully, say that they are on sound ethical ground supporting their client to the fullest. How could you prosecute them for that? If anything you should prosecute them if they didn't use every dirty trick in the book based on an ethical argument. We need a legal argument, not an ethical one which is, hopefully, what I made clear in my comments.

Lawyers have ethical obligations. They have ethical rules as a requirement of the profession, and they swear an oath.

This article seems to argue:

- Attorney client privilege is unethical.

- Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

- Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do.

I personally don't see these as bad things. Lawyers will trying and minimize the risk the company is in for violating various laws that exist around the world. I think it is ethical for them to give such advice. I also think attorney client privilege is also a big part of being ethical and saying that it is unethical is just trying to manipulate people's values to the author's benefit.

    I personally don't see these as bad things.

With the dose of bad faith you put on those arguments, it sounds like you would fit right in with the described Meta lawyers. I'm not sure it's even worth engaging with you considering how you engaged with the content by ignoring the preface about John Adams and the ethics of practicing law.

>ignoring the preface about John Adams

I don't think it was a useful example since what is happening with Meta is different. It's not like a British soldier admitted to Adams that he murdered someone and Adams shared that fact in court.

Every now and then I get the suspicion hacker news is used to practice sophistry for the workplace without the risk of making yourself look like a jackass at work.

Of course it would break the rules about civility here to directly accuse someone of that. Which makes me want to joke that it's an intentional feature of the site and explains why a VC firm wants to run a tech watering hole.

Sometimes I think people are so into libertarian views as almost to be a religion that they see anything a government would do an ethically evil act, so it appears they have no morals/ethics of their own when they share those thoughts.

This is a breathtakingly disingenuous summary of the article. I cannot imagine a perspective sufficiently warped to produce this interpretation a priori.

Agreed. It’s easy to imagine billions of reasons why people will people will defend indefensible behavior by companies with billions of dollars though.

> Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

This, to me, is the crime. They are purposefully destroying data because they know it poses a legal risk to them. That is different from deleting data that is costing you money and isn't useful to your business. This is also different than counseling them to delete data to avoid problems if there is a security breach. Both of these are valid reasons to delete data in support of the business and in defense of risks associated with holding that data. Counseling that you should delete data because it may be used as evidence against you in a criminal probe though is obstructing foreseeable future investigations because you believe you may be committing crimes. The distinction, I think, is clear.

I agree with you that lawyers should be aggressive about protecting their clients and counseling them but when that counsel is to tell them to obstruct investigations they, to me, are now part of the crime.

as a lawyer, I'll just note that the legal system has standards for this. specifically, you can't delete stuff that poses legal risks to you once you reasonably expect a lawsuit about it. but you can delete it as part of normal business activity until that point.

Resisting production isn't unethical, but telling your client to commit fraud is illegal, unethical, and waives attorney-client privilege.

Generally that lawyers in tech can be both good and bad, but that both the culture at west coast tech companies and how they handle their attorneys often leads to ethical issues that just do not happen in more buttoned down industries elsewhere. In particular many tech companies are just more protective of employees for no discernable purpose. An investment bank faced with a similar situation as the DC v. Meta case would have blamed and terminated the employees and attorneys involved, and trussed them up for prison if needed to protect the company. An oil company accused of faking environmental studies would throw the guy who doctored them under the bus.

This also serves the public interest (although some may disagree) because it preserves a productive company and provides a powerful incentive for management to grind individual corporate criminals into meatballs to protect itself and shareholders.

Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

The other stupid thing that Meta did was commissioning these studies in the first place. What is the company doing? How does this benefit shareholder value? Is this a jobs program? If you did not like the answers they might give you, you should never have paid a bunch of academics to do these studies in the first place. The company sells digital fent to the masses. Of course it's bad for kids. You don't need a study to tell you that.

> Meta's instinct was to defend the employee and the illegal activity rather than sacrificing the lamb to protect the company and the shareholders. They are not the only company that does things like this and it just makes no sense. It is something in the water in Northern California that makes them do this or some strange Pacific wind.

It's unchecked greed, that's the thing. It absolutely makes sense if you know you can bring your guy into the office of President - print money and if you break laws and get caught before the President is on your side, use all your resources to prolong the case just enough.

And lo and behold, we saw one Big Tech exec after the other swear fealty to Trump. A mixture of rule by mob (it was literally called the "PayPal mafia") and neo-feudalism.

Protecting the employee instead of the company/shareholders is unchecked greed?

No, the "unchecked greed" is to keep on doing the illegal thing because you know you'll get rewarded in the end. The "right" thing to do would be to admit you fucked up, fire the persons responsible (including, if need be, up to the top levels) and stay on the right side of the law.

Meta chose the other option - keep breaking the law and use all resources at their disposal to delay any sort of consequences.

> Attorney client privilege is unethical.

the article doesn't argue this. It argues that sometimes attorney client privilege can be abused to shield criminal acts and that lawyers and state bar associations have a role to play in preventing those abuses and holding violators accountable, which hasn't happened in this case.

> Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical.

It doesn't say this either. It talks about the deliberate destruction of evidence of actual crimes and the intentional suppression of the truth so that people can continue to be hurt.

> Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do.

I have no idea where you even got that impression.

I have a legal background and am used to HN saying quite...interesting...things, and I've been here for 16 years, so I think I can translate the last one.

The idea is the Meta researcher who said every time they put on a headset, they ended up seeing sexual acts from adults directed at children, was the problem because they were collecting data on children.

You reframed the researcher's report that every time they put on a headset, children were being sexually harrased by adults as "Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do." -- that one will be clearest to on-lookers, and the other two are just as addled.

I genuinely hope it's out of: a lack of understanding of legal terms, ethics, and how to read critically. And that it is not trolling.

It's quite stultifying to read as someone who does have those understandings.

It reads as lying at best and trolling at worst, but my red-line is assigning motivation.

Which is a shame, because the article is a good example of what happens when you're cowardly and pretend "reacting to what it is" is "assigning motivation": inter alia, a 17 strike sex trafficker policy, signed off by corporate.

>- Attorney client privilege is unethical.

Cynically abusing attorney client privilege is unethical and a violation of the powers granted to attorneys by society.

I'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either.

But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

So, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows.

Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.

>But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously.

Any particular reason why you think the author is incorrectly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, including attorney-client privilege?

>Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.

I think you misunderstood the point, which was that if Adams had knowledge that the british soldier did have such an intent, he'd be violating his ethical obligations by withholding that information on the principal of attorney-client privilege.

"The latest revelations about Meta's malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research - an initiative known as Project Mercury - that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta's lawyers buried the findings."

Further reading:

https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40...

Excerpts:

"And we start with what is perhaps the most succinct acknowledgment of the problem, from a chat between two UX Researchers: "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug... We're basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can't feel reward anymore... like their reward tolerance is so high... I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn't want to hear it he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological... the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn't... the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads." Ex. 74 at 2152-53."

"One Meta employee warned, "if the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves? I went... oh." Ex. 91 at 1943."

One might engage this topic better by asking a series of rhetorical questions. 1. Imagine you drove 40mph in a 25mph zone, a school zone. Children were present. Do you present yourself to the police? 2. You consult an attorney. Should the attorney report your conduct to the police independently? 3. You write a root cause analysis in an effort to verify your perception of exceeding the speed limit and endangering children. Then you lose interest. Are you prohibited from deleting it? 4. You give the analysis to the attorney. Must they permanently preserve it until one of the children you endangered sues you?

Attorney-client privilege is always thin with in-house counsel, and it’s a high-stakes, hard-decisions situation both defending and challenging in all cases. The mention of crime-fraud suggests my hypothetical is a tamer than the actual facts considered by the judge, and this may be the real lesson: 5. How do you distinguish between speeding in a school zone and something that requires a fundamentally different response, even one contrary to your client’s goals?

Ask yourself a question, should we protect a trillion dollar company from perpetuating child abuse by trivializing their harm and compare it to speeding?

btw, school zones are 20mph or less. It's telling in this analogy that you don't seem to have children of your own?

> you don't seem to have children of your own?

No, your intuition is incorrect. I often think of the random carnage inflicted by automobiles on bystanders as a model for societal inconsistency, which perhaps was the reason it came to mind for the hypothetical. Tire tracks across the sidewalk, marks on the post, just another risk wanly accepted by society.

Anyway, for a more extreme hypothetical, all you have to do is make the speed more egregious. One answer at 40mph; how high until the attorney walks you to the police station? 250mph? Habitual?

It's systematic is the problem. People have been trained by the auto/oil companies over fifty-plus-years to accept the unacceptable, that somehow the automobile is the only way to be "free" and be transported.

I don't think there's any speed in which an attorney turns you in for the crime of reckless operation since we (society) don't see the risk of harm that didn't lead to realized harm. If you injured or killed someone, you get turned in, but obviously that's too late.

I live on a 25mph street, I often see people traveling at double that speed and there are pedestrians nearly all the time. I've complained to the police only to be told that "it's infrequent so we can't catch them" despite this being a daily experience. I wish we lived in a different reality where these risks weren't so acceptable to the society.

FWIW, "Careless People" is an excellent read.

In which the CEO of the single largest social media company, who's responsible (and whose algorithms are responsible) for the mediation of human interactions across the entire planet, really dislikes losing board games so his staff is instructed to let him win

No. Seriously.

Related previously:

Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817

Normally at a major corp, the attorneys act as a buffer to stop management from doing crime. Once the legal team becomes co-opted that's the HOV lane to the SEC.

The title poses it like companies (such as Meta) should be ethical and they might sometime stop to be. No for-profit company is obliged to be ethical, only legal. So the surprising news here are 'Meta used to be ethical until recently'

To all the parents: read Careless People. Realize everyone, including the author, is flaming hot trash. And never let your kids near social media ever again.

As a parent who doesn't let their kids on social media (and seems to be one of a handful of parent who use parental controls on phones), the FOMO is very real with the kids. They don't understand why I'm such a terrible person that won't let them have access to things their friends do. Friends will come over for sleepovers, and our kids will sit on YouTube for hours with their friends because we never let them on it and that's all their friends want to do.

I don't know how to educate other parents to encourage more controls. Most are too busy to care it seems, the kids are content with their brain rot etc. I hate that these companies turn me into a villain with my kids because they produce hyper addictive crap without any constraints.

Have you read the book? It would likely give you some good talking/discussion points...such as "FB intentionally let genocide happen. Do you think we should support them with our time?"

"FB intentionally let genocide happen"

What does not mean exactly?

maybe talking about https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

If you read Reckless People, it becomes quite clear how Facebook is culpable.

I go to friends' houses and the kids are watching the dumbest, most egregious things imagined on Youtube, constantly. When I ask if they go outside to play, they claim it's too hot, too cold, or too dangerous. They are attracted to these overdramatic influencers doing Jackass style stunts. And I find the entire experience grating.

Have you considered the possibility that others simply do not agree with you?

There is a happy medium between "brain rot for hours" and "absolutely zero".

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. At parents' evening one teacher told me I was literally the only parent of that school year that uses parental controls.

Thankfully I don't have the FOMO part with my kids - they all seem to understand the reasoning and seem pretty fine with it - none of them have ever asked for TikTok for instance. We recently went to a family gathering though and I was genuinely shocked to see one toddler, barely able to speak, left alone with TikTok on a phone, just swiping away for hours.

The book was absolutely horrifying.

Meta is far worse than most people realize.

Spoilers please! Are they doing worse than their genocide phase?

The Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths).

Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top.

In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.

> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent.

That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.

It wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...

I want to point out a few things here because people are going to split hairs about definitions and other irrelevancies

I don't know exactly how they do this in non-english languages, but english speakers have complained that all the posts they see from friends are the most abrasive and inflammatory. Specifically those. So it's not just "a neutral platform". If this was happening in Myanmar then of course it inflamed ethnic tensions

Second, Facebook's barging into emerging markets - with Free Basics, they sent letters on behalf of Indians to the telecom regulatory body (including net neutrality advocates who were very much against it). Facebook in Myanmar would not even be a thing in the first place were it not for their larger internet.org initiative. (I don't dislike "social media". It's fine to connect with people, but not the way FB does it) Whether we ought to have these services wholly decentralized or some sort of KYC system - dunno. But FB (and specifically Zuckerberg) are just bad faith actors

If the system was decentralised and started helping out a genocide, what would the mechanism be for stopping that?

The free-speech absolutists would presumably just shrug but that seems absolutely wild.

But you're not addressing my fact it was artificial ranked ordering. Also, Facebook (per Sarah Wynn Williams) was told about this and they did nothing about it

I’m aware Facebook didn’t act, I wasn’t aware of the rankings.

I’m just wondering how a decentralised system would manage something like this.

My biggest takeaway from the book is Zuck is such a brat who got so grumpy and pouted so much when other facebook employees on the private jet beat him at board games that they set up an internal plan to always let him win.

Sheryl Sandberg comes off poorly too, calling her assistant "Little Doll," beckoning her to sleep in her lap during private jet trips and buying her lingerie on business trips. Then on another trip she tried to get a different employee to come cuddle and sleep in the jet bed with her and pouted when this person declined, saying the first assistant always would so why does this person have a problem with it. She also has racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino nannies because they are "service oriented."

> racist comments, talking about how she likes to always hire Filipino

Filipino is not a race.

Mark has been known to be a major piece of shit for 20+ years now. How is this news to anyone?

Upvoted, to rescue you from the sea of grey

Hi, FAANG engineers

There's a lot of indignant people who seem to expect or insist that meta should act according to their own incoherent set of ethical frameworks or half-baked "morality", imagining that their poorly conceived, narrowly defined and inconsistently applied morals are universal constants that must be operant for all. But somehow none of them has considered that fb is not a public good and they can just opt out. fb has always been a garbage heap for rubes, not sure why people need it to conform to their downmarket ethical delusions.

Legal teams tend to be the most "pragmatic" crowd in companies in my experience.

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg

I'm sure folks will come out of the woodwork to say that this isn't relevant as it was 20 years ago and Zuckerberg was just a wee lad at the time. However, I've never seen any evidence that Meta's attitude towards its users has changed since this quote was written. Every new Meta scandal just helps keep this thing relevant for another year or two.

Correct. The hostile takeover of Whatsapp, snooping on Snapchat after copying their features 100 times into 1000 of their products. And so much else

Unchecked white-collar crime by US tech companies poisoning the world.

When it comes to voluntary consumption or use, I always vote for freedom over restriction or censorship. Let people eat all the fried chicken they want if that is what they want to do with their hard-earned dollars.

Except there's been way too much investment to trick the human brain into that consumption, so it is not a fair fight - that's true both for food and for tech. There are countless documentaries, books and articles on this. You're bringing a knife to a gunfight

> You're bringing a knife to a gunfight

It’s worse than that, it’s like bringing a knife to a fight against an entire army equipped with all the latest and greatest weapons of the day.

You are free to sue Meta. If you can demonstrate harm, you will win. They may pay you off handsomely to avoid seeing the case go to trial. It's because we are free that the option exists. Is that not better than letting government decide which companies you can and cannot sue?

That's only a viable option if you have have the money to bankroll it.

If you have good evidence, a decent lawyer will do it on contingency. The settlement offer will easily exceed seven figures.

You'd have to have a real lock on it to get anybody but a shady lawyer to take it on. It's very unlikely that you'd be able to do that under almost any circumstance. Yes, the potential payout would be large, but the expenses the law firm would have to pay in the meantime, and carry for the many years it would take for the lawsuit to come to a conclusion, would also be very large.

It would be a huge gamble and reputable law firms would have to feel extremely confident that they wouldn't end up on the losing side. That's a big ask regardless of how good you case is. These tech companies have enormous warchests, can drag these things out essentially forever, and the odds they'll find a technicality that would blunt the lawsuit are very high.

This assumes a perfect justice system, and that’s not the case.

Regardless, the judicial branch is a perfect example of the limits of freedom in practice, and the legislative does, in fact, decide who one can and cannot sue.

Your country can have that. I want my country to have a functional society. I think I know who will win.

You must be living somewhere other than the US. Freedom is a founding principle here. Without it, the US would not be the country it is today.

"Freedom" with a million asterisks.

More freedom than anywhere else in the world.

Love your ignorance. What you call freedom is your freedom to hurt others through your ignorance:

- freedom to be racist against people of color

- freedom to do hitler salutes wherever you want

- freedom to carry a gun to school or to mcdonalds

- freedom to get lead poisoning from your municipal drinking water

- freedom to coal roll your truck next to people

- freedom to have car tires without any profile that can explode any time

- freedom to get bankrupted by uninsured asshat's car crashing into you

- freedom to work at age 80 as a walmart greeter

We have deterrents in place for all of those actions. Freedom means freedom to perform an action, not freedom from it's consequences. What you advocate for is slavery. You may yet get it but it may not look like what you think it should.

There’s “freedom to” and “freedom from” and both are very important.

Freedom to raise your children without having them exploited for profit is also freedom.

People don't live alone they live in a society, even if you're above these temptations others aren't. This is why drugs are a problem, don't want tweakers in my train/bus/...

Then make more money and move to a better area. In the US, you have the freedom to do so.

It's not some physical law that societies require rough areas where people suffer.

The human experience is defined by comparison. That's how our five senses work. While we can work for betterment of society as a whole, there will always be points of comparison between segments. Some segments will be better off than others. To deny that, to try to conform everyone to the same strata, that's contrary to our very nature.

Every so often we get a wave of socialism/communism hitting HN as a new generation is exposed to these ideas. It is a seductive idea, to be fair, has convinced many an intellectual over the years. It's very persuasive, especially on paper, yet it keeps failing in real life for one simple reason. It doesn't account for the human psyche, which is this:

People don't want to be equal. They want to be better. People are envious of success, they wish it upon themselves, not upon others. For, would you consider it success if everyone achieved what you did?

It’s quite obvious that making money has trumped ethics in US companies for a long time now. Look what united healthcare does to its “customers” to make more money.[1]

Every last one of them should be rotting in jail, but that ain’t good for the ol GDP which is more important that peoples lives.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-t...

> Every last one of them should be rotting in jail

Even if it happened, they’d get pardoned.

First it was 'Greed is good'.

Now it's 'Fraud is fine'.

Trump has twice pardoned the same woman, Adriana Camberos, for defrauding people

You mean the same Trump that was found guilty on all counts in the NY fraud trial... what a coincidence.

If it was about GDP it'd have "some" moral defense: That this leads to overall wealth growth of the population.

But it's not about GDP. It's about shareholder value which is absolutely not representative of the whole population.

Extreme greed is now part of US social contract, top to bottom, and has driven the whole society to madness sadly.

GDP does not measure “the overall wealth of the population” in any semantically meaningful way

But otherwise your point is correct

And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

It's like a video game where the more depraved your thinking is, the more money you make off it, and the rest of the characters sit around like NPCs and just let it happen. Well, maybe they don't, but when they pull a Super Mario Brothers trick the entire state apparatus is used to track them down and imprison them.

Never liked GTA 3 onwards for this reason.

> And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

This is at the crux of everything in America. There are zero punishments for corporations and executives but there are bureaucratic lock ins for "customers".

And the answer is not merely regulation. Why shouldn't I be able to switch health insurance at ANY time? If I am unsatisfied with United Healthcare, I should be able to get anything else right away. Why impose laws on me?

Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.

This really is a problem only the government can solve, by continuously auditing coverage decisions at random, and sufficiently penalizing the companies that understaff at best, and intentionally deny or delay payment at worst.

Currently, years might go by until CMS audits the company, and even then, there are no consequences. Try arguing for a higher budget for more $400k doctors and $200k pharmacists in this environment.

The current situation is because one company can lower premiums by reducing quality of service, all the other ones have to also, and the buyer rarely buys on anything but price since it’s usually a third party buying it, like an employer.

> Health insurers are required to accept all insureds without pricing the insured’s risks. It would increase premiums a lot if people could bounce around, as it would make already difficult to forecast medical loss ratios even more volatile.

It's almost as if there is nothing insurance-like about US health "insurance" but the name.

Picture health insurance models laid on top of your car. Imagine your car gets totaled:

Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25,000 for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. Buttttt... that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."

US health insurance premiums are not insurance-like, as they are mostly a tax due to the forced wealth redistribution.

US health insurance coverage is very insurance-like, due to the out of pocket maximum.

Determining auto insurance coverage is very simple, because fixing/replacing cars is simple.

Determining health insurance coverage can't be simple, because fixing bodies is not simple. It's unknown what will and will not fix issues, how to even measure if there is an issue, and what will cause more issues and the cost/benefit of that fix.

The people who can fix the issue are a lot more rare and in demand than the people who can fix automobiles.

Also, the medicine is patented, and the seller of the medicine wants to be able to charge different prices to different buyers, hence all the games.

> US health insurance coverage is very insurance-like, due to the out of pocket maximum.

Well, other than that whole "out of network" thing...

> Determining health insurance coverage can't be simple, because fixing bodies is not simple. It's unknown what will and will not fix issues, how to even measure if there is an issue, and what will cause more issues and the cost/benefit of that fix.

Don't disagree - but that doesn't make what we have more "insurance-like".

What is the alternative to a network? Auto insurers, home insurers, all kinds of insurance relies on negotiating prices with sellers.

Insurance cannot work if any seller can send a bill for any amount to the insurer and be owed that amount.

I mean for most auto and home insurers, the "negotiated price" is a pretty loose thing. My insurer might ask for a quote from someone in their "preferred network" but I can get a quote from anyone I want to do the work, and if it's within x% of the preferred quote, it's automatically approved, otherwise someone from the insurer calls them and asks about the different pricing, and I've generally got that approval within 24-48 hours. (Which has also worked in my favor - with an auto glass claim, their repairer was insistent that third party glass would work fine, despite the HUD, but the other was able to demonstrate to the insurer that OEM glass was required).

Mostly this all boils down to "the healthcare industry in the US needs to be comprehensively revamped in any one of several different ways or methodologies, but likely won't be".

> but I can get a quote from anyone I want to do the work, and if it's within x% of the preferred quote, it's automatically approved,

It would be the same in healthcare if quotes were for 4 and low 5 figures with no future costs.

Not only does healthcare easily reach into the 5, 6, and 7 figures, but the health insurance company is also on the hook for myriad known and unknown issues caused by the initial costs.

> It would be the same in healthcare if quotes were for 4 and low 5 figures with no future costs.

I mean, this is somewhat the same in auto, too. Is one of the reasons you're recommended to go through insurance even if involved in an accident and the other party offers to give you cash for the initial quote - it's quite common that they start repair work and find other issues because they hadn't removed components or panels to give you a quote. Got cash from someone? Now you have to go back and say "Well, I know the quote said $1,500, but they took off the back quarter panel and found other issues and now it's $3,800..."

That being said, ICD codes, one of the cornerstones of billing, are predicated around "encounters", and certainly not "future costs".

> is also on the hook for myriad known and unknown issues caused by the initial costs.

There's a pretty huge asterisk to all that. Health insurers are adept at neatly sidestepping any obligations. They've fought and won many many times over in court on similar issues, "Insurer is denying me care and I'm going to die/suffer serious issues as a result!" Insurer's response, which has been held in court many times over? "We're not denying you any care at all, we're just declining to accept financial responsibility for it. You're free to get that care and be directly billed."

>There's a pretty huge asterisk to all that. Health insurers are adept at neatly sidestepping any obligations

This might sidestep some obligations, rightly or wrongly. They clearly do not sidestep "any" obligations. The amount of money spent on healthcare claims (medical loss ratios) is public information, available in their SEC filings. It is required to be 80% or more by law.

https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/insights/2023/mar/...

Every state government has an insurance regulator that also has to approve insurance prices, which are based on the cost of claims. The regulator is not going to let an insurer increase premiums just for profit.

Also, the non profit and for profit insurers have similar premiums, with the for profit insurers having ~3% profit margins or less, indicating a highly competitive market where the revenue is barely covering costs.

Shareholders aren't making any money either (10 year returns lag SP500):

https://totalrealreturns.com/s/CVS,ELV,UNH,MOH,VOO,CNC,HUM,C...

Finally, the fact that Buffett/Dimon/Bezos tapped out on creating a competitor should really drive home how little the profit potential is in health insurance, and any less "sidestepping" of obligations would lead to higher premiums.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/04/haven-the-amazon-berkshire-j...

> They clearly do not sidestep "any" obligations.

I worked in EMS. United battled a bunch of civil suits years ago where they had denied HEMS transports (helicopter transport) from accident scenes due to "lacking pre-authorization". For a car accident.

What would that even look like?

"This is John, I'm a paramedic working on one of your patients who was hit by a truck. We would like to fly him to the trauma center due to extensive multisystem trauma but we need your authorization. His name? Hang on, let me find his wallet. No, that's Smythe, S-M-Y-T-H-E, sorry, I know, it's a bit loud with the jaws of life in the background... Uhh, sure, I guess I can hold for a nurse consult..."

The reason insurance companies have specific sign-up windows and enrollment periods is because the insurance model breaks down if anyone could switch at any time.

If someone could get the cheapest plan when they're healthy and then go switch to the best plan as soon as they started getting sick with something, everyone would do exactly that.

Insurance companies are required to accept patients regardless of pre-existing conditions, so there has to be something counter-balancing that to prevent people from only getting good insurance when they plan to use it.

> And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

Well, I mean, except for large, systemic ramifications that affect everyone in society, but who's counting?

In practice the system is such that 'everyone' doesn't really seem to include the people making a lot of money they are effectively outside the system the rest of us have to deal with.

I was chatting with someone about the evils of capitalism. My position was that capitalism was viable as long as culture controlled capitalism. When culture capitulates to capitalism it's a death spiral.

When I speak with overseas friends there's often a sense of "of course" or "reasonable" moral lines in the relationship between their culture and where capitalism can't tread. That seems completely gone right now in the US, though it's been heading in that direction for decades. It was mediated by social constructs that have since been completely eradicated.

EDIT: Always interesting to watch comment points go up and then come down.

When U.S. lawmakers admitted that between democracy and capitalism they'd pick capitalism, I knew we were in trouble.

Are you referring to a specific event here?

Here's an example: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/18/capitalism-trumps-democracy-...

If I have any hope for the future of America it is that the upcoming generation finds 'Industrial Society and its Future', and instead of becoming radicalized, simply turns its back on tech fetishization.

Almost any reply mentioning that capitalism actually could have some problems on HN ends up being controversial. I can only assume some hate it and others worship it like a god.

The people making obscene amounts of money give zero shits about that.

They live in private neighborhoods with private security guards and send their kids to private schools. Once they get enough money they fly on private jets and go to private islands to private parties that you're not invited to.

Simply put the consolidation of wealth in a very small percentage of the population always leads to outcomes like this. These people become completely disconnected from the reality that 98% of the rest of their country lives in.

You cannot build morals through legislation. Ultimately all systems rely on the individual to behave responsibly and morally. You cannot legislate your way out of that.

The collapse of collective consideration is a major reason the west is in decline. Championed by neoliberals without insight into history, it seems.

>Championed by neoliberals without insight into history,

Ah yes, it was the neoliberals that spout "I am the rugged American individualist and I don't need no society"

That is exactly correct, are you being sarcastic?

You can absolutely disincentivize unethical behavior through legislation though, whether they believe it at the core of their being or not. See slavery, murder, rape, robbery, etc. There will always be loopholes people can exploit, but that doesn't mean legislating away the larger ones doesn't have an effect.

Legislation on education curriculums can also have an impact on people's core morals, though that can be tough when even concepts like "share your toys" and "slavery was wrong" can be called indoctrination these days.

Of course. But ultimately every institution rests on the goodwill and morality of its individuals.

You can’t build a moral society without laws eliminating unethical parasitical business models either.

That is a very false and misleading dilemma.

Coordination matters. And coordination is too hard to do as a call for everyone to just be good.

If you live in a jungle of “free” actors (unconstrained by a need to compete constructively), the good path becomes unrealistic for everyone. And everyone but a few, have to work increasingly harder to pay off the damage of those few.

Or suffer the unrelenting undertow on their lives as highly rewarded parasitic behavior finances its own continued growth.

—

What would a single chart of computing power devoted to commercial surveillance and feed manipulation, on hire to actors both good and bad, look like?

I can tell you, that the scrapbook and organic sharing aspects of the major social networks, even with non-surveillance personalized ads, would be profitable with a small fraction of the servers being used to optimize users for advertisers. If that wasn’t the enabled bar.

In the meantime, the leverage compounds as how do good actors who need to advertise compete without themselves feeding these highly centralized surveillance/manipulation machines? Even while they increasingly siphon off the margins of their revenue as real producers?

And how can direct competitors avoid becoming monsters? Whatever OpenAI’s natural good intentions, high or low: to compete with Google and Facebook in the consumer market they will also have no choice but to also start and innovate new ways of extracting surveillance/manipulation value from users.

Not just ads to cover natural costs, but s/m driven ads to keep up with the s/m margins and therefore investment by competitors they have to compete with.

—

Without guardrails for everyone, everyone (at a practical level) is forced to be actively or passively complicit in increasing damage as a major growth industry.

Margins for profits in legally externalized negative outcomes are, by definition, better than for productive on-their-merits businesses.

I’m not arguing for a lack of regulation or a jungle. Far from it. But I’m pointing out that many people behave within the law but not in the spirit of it, for example.

Google exists, Facebook exists, both require intrusive advertising technology that has undermined democracy, led to large scale violence, etc. and it’s legal, and thousands of nerds make it happen.

>You cannot legislate your way out of that.

You absolutely can use legislation to tamp down on amoral behavior, though.

You can reduce it, but nowhere near eliminate it.

Ah yes, human history is full of societies that never legislated morality. They always trusted in the individual. After all we all remember the nature of God's law and the ten commandments - Thou shalt follow your conscience.

Humanity is a largely defined by our exercise of legislating morality. For a lack of insight into history you should consult a mirror.

I didn’t say don’t legislate, I said it is not enough. The responsibility ultimately lies with the individual.

If I’m an academic and I want to pursue being a professor over helping a student, that’s my choice and no system will stop me. That’s why so many PhD students are endlessly screwed over by their supervisors so they can fuel their career.

Individual morality is what maintains institutions and the west has replaced that culture with selfish neoliberalism and now it is screwed.

This doesn't make any sense. Is it individual or up to the culture? You have a culture but it ultimately lies with the individual? So what was this culture before? How can the ultimate responsibility ever be displaced by any culture if it's up to the individual ultimately? Is your claim neoliberalism single handedly altered the nature of morality? You don't think something like students getting screwed can see improvements if legislated? Selfishness was invented within the last 100 years?

Sorry, but imo your argument is just bad. It's just griping about neoliberalism dressed up as some argument whose terms wouldn't even pass a type checker level of logical validation. And it's also boring. Neoliberalism is so easy to dunk on these days and yet you couldn't even manage to do it convincingly.

> And why shouldn't it when there is zero negative ramifications for being completely fucking unethical?

Why is there a requirement for consequences to act moral? If I have to have a threat of punishment to be good, then I'm not being good and it's all transactional.

That's one of the points in favor of capitalism. Most people are not innately good (even "normal" people). The goal of capitalism in theory is to cajole them into acting good by linking helping a customer with monetary benefits.

That is what our conservative parents and teachers taught us. In reality capitalism cares only for the owning class.

Which isn't to say capitalism is worthless, it can be a powerful force when regulated for the benefit of everyone.

Which is why i say in theory, yes. If there are no regulations the ideal job for a capitalist to take is robbing people!

Capitalism has no goal beyond the propagation of capitalist entities, just as evolution has no goal beyond the propagation of evolved entities.

The _implementation_ of capitalism has a goal, it should be obvious that's what i meant from the context.

This sounds like goal post moving. Not much different from the people that say "We've just not tried the right kind of communism yet, I'm sure it will work next time".

Real world behaviors and markets are far more complex than a dogmatic market ideology.

>Why is there a requirement for consequences to act moral?

See, most people don't want to murder and kill other people. For them we don't need to make laws saying murder is wrong and we'll hook your ass to ole'sparky if you proceed to do it.

For you, we do need to make that law so you have to think twice about carving people up like cantaloupes, and for dealing with those that do break the law.

A lot of law is the encoding of moral and ethical behavior. We didn't have the law, some people acted immoral, then we made the law to punish said behavior. For many people this pushed them away from the grey area between legal behavior that is immoral because if they act unethical new laws would be developed to punish them further (and people wonder why we have so many laws in the first place, quit acting like shitheads and we won't).

>then I'm not being good and it's all transactional.

Hurray, you've realized there is no god and the physical world we live in is built on cause and effect, thank you for catching up to the 20th century.

Cause: "you act good"

Effect: "I don't crack open your head and eat the tasty goo inside while screaming like a primate, since acting good allows us to build societies that have benefits for us all"

Because, "opt-in ethics" turns stronger ethical preference into a game theoretic disadvantage.

There are two populations: population A is those who prefer ethical behavior internally and would volunteer for it even if not compelled. Population B is those who don't prefer ethical behavior internally, wouldn't volunteer for it, and must be compelled to act ethically from without if they are to act ethically at all.

In a landscape that impartially disincentivizes unethical behavior, both A and B can coexist.

But in a landscape that DOES NOT impartially disincentivize unethical behavior, everyone acts the same as before—unless there's a benefit to acting unethically. In which case, A, those who prefer to be ethical for its own sake, will inevitably be outcompeted by B, those who engage in any behavior regardless of ethics, so long as that behavior confers advantage.

Enough of that on a long enough time scale and the voluntarily ethical population just disappears.

So, either we enforce ethical behavior (even on those who need no forcing), or we create an unethical free-for-all waiting to happen.

In some cases the "waiting to happen" stage can last a surprisingly long time. Centuries, maybe. But never, as long as B's exist and are free to act, without end.

>stage can last a surprisingly long time.

Typically the behavior is "Very slowly, then suddenly all at once". Which makes issues easy to ignore and by the time all at once happens there is no time to actually deal with it.

Yes, absolutely.

In fact, it behooves all B's to make all the A's BELIEVE that society is still "Basically Ethical" for as long as possible.

That's what prevents the A's from banding together and forcibly restructuring things to reset the clock... for as long as possible.

One solution to this problem that was popular in certain ancient societies was, "Round up and execute all the B's." But A) that's not very ethical, so we can't do that without becoming B's ourselves; and B) you can't tell who is a B just by looking at them, or their skin color or race or eye color or religion or whatever; and C) B's have a maximal incentive to become those who decide who is to be executed for being a B, so the whole thing is prone to MASSIVE corruption.

So the thing Liberal societies have done is create systems where we punish BEHAVIOR rather than trying to classify people. And it works, as long as we do the "impartially disincentivizing unethical behavior" thing I mentioned before.

>Why is there a requirement for consequences to act moral? If I have to have a threat of punishment to be good, then I'm not being good and it's all transactional.

Morals are not universal; different people have different morals. Ancient Greece would not have batted an eye at relationships that we consider pedophilia. Slaves were kept in various societies over time, as recently as 6 generations ago, with varying levels of "morality" attributed to the practice.

> but when they pull a Super Mario Brothers trick

I see what you did there :)

You could change the society and laws. Right now this is of course not quite possible, but people can change that. Get rid of the oligarchs in the USA, for instance.

Making money and other types of material gratification has trumped ethics, notions of virtue and honor, and responsibility towards posterity in the general US population, the US ruling class, and US elites.

Ascribing this to just "US companies" is a cop-out or a cope. The US is in complete social collapse across the entire spectrum of society.

I am coming at this from a right-wing perspective.

Facebook had zero ethics to start with. It's worked out very well for them so far so there's no surprise that they're keeping with a winning formula. It falls on governments to step in and tell them that enough is enough. Until that happens, don't expect them to start to act ethically on their own.

This is not only in the US. It might be more pronounced in the US. This is mostly everywhere.

> Look what united healthcare does to its “customers” to make more money.

Hold short. They already lost a CEO to an act of revenge at the end of '24... and still didn't think that maybe they should stop, reflect on themselves and cut down on the BS before the next CEO catches a bullet?

I'm not sure if it's audacity, ignorance or stupidity that's at play here.

Greed

No, they don't care. They have shareholders to please.

Why anyone thought that applying laws of shareholder capitalism to health insurance was a good idea is beyond me.

> Why anyone thought that applying laws of shareholder capitalism to health insurance was a good idea is beyond me.

The idea itself of using the one thing capitalism is actually good at - achieving the lowest possible cost in the short term - isn't that bad.

But while that may work out for consumer goods... it's not a good thing to have in healthcare, because here are actual human lives at stake.

This is exactly the sensational take (devoid of nuance and information) that we should collectively push back against. You should read the actual guardian article that Vice links to and investigate the actual reality.

If you actually look at the data, the vast majority of expenditures in medicine are the last few months of life. Paying ~500K to 1M to extend life ~6 months so you can spend the time hooked up to tubes and passing in and out of consciousness to deal with the pain is NOT HUMANE.

US Nurses are more and more using an "uber for nursing" apps which buy US credit data to change the rates they offer nurses - the more debt they have, the lower rates they get because they are judged to be more desperate.

https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/uber-for-nursing...

When lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends.

That is a ship that sailed a long, long, long time ago.

I funny it amusing/sad that this story was written by a substack author, and not a major news publication

It’s articles like these that make me believe if Mark had not dropped out of Harvard, he could have become world class.

Alas.

if only he had stayed long enough to take PHIL S-18 -- Human Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy

Does that course cover "It's not a good idea to forcibly add gay people to groups and then publically post it to their timeline, outing them"? Or perhaps the photo tags that get added of them (sometimes automatically) at the gay club

(I use the second one as an example, without reference to anything specific, but the first one really did happen. Jason Calacanis talks about it in his interview on Lex Fridman)

Isn't Mark 'dropping out' potentially buying the lede? He was in hot water for Facemash and almost expelled. Maybe his hand was forced?

Yeah, I like this take.

He was in hot water and got adopted by the other techno super villains that brought us to this timeline.

Trying not to be petulant, but I have some difficulty reading Meta and ethical in the same sentence.

Since reading too much philosophy (username relevant), I don't think ethics are worth teaching. Instead, put laws in place that benefit the state/population(I know these can conflict, but at least in a republic, there are power sharing agreements that can balance these).

At best, you can indoctrinate people with a religion, conventional religion or a modern ascetic stoic humanist religion.

But its silly to think that religion is going to stop 100% of the population from doing anti-social things.

This might be strange to hear, but people have different and conflicting values. The worker at Meta might have a life goal to help society, the executive might have a life goal of making lots of money. These conflict, and its overly optimistic to rely on individual ethics to create a good world to live in.

Now I'll give an example: Should affairs be punished? Currently, there are plenty of US states that don't have laws on this. However, there may be something to be said about having a contractual agreement that penalizes this. If there is no contract, then it doesn't matter.

We can enforce pro-social values, we don't need to rely on individuals being wholly good.

Are you faniliar with the concept of the "Andon cord"? You might be interested in reading this post: https://ulveon.net/p/2025-06-20-the-andon-cord-mechanisms-an...

What ethical duties? Their job is to safeguard the money printing machine and to isolate it from all externalized costs and consequences. Those people would sell their children into slavery if it made them a nickel.

That's why they work at Meta. Where else can you make comparable boatloads of money from the misery of children?

To the surprise of absolutely nobody. Meta's main shareholder is devoid of any intrinsic ethics, it should come as absolutely no surprise that their legal team has abandoned their ethical duties because I would have assumed they never had any in the first place.

Zuckerberg's only saving grace by now is that he's not the only despicable billionaire.

> without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised

Well - capitalism nullified that. You need money - and connections - to win for many cases in court. So it is more of a milking game than "the old ideals".

> today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country

This creates a conflict of interest. If the lawyer thinks he is not responsible for winning the case, then a defendent should be able to defend himself or herself in court. Though this leads to an automatic loss, let's be honest. The current system is designed to make the courts and lawyers rich(er).

> Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs.

So why should this matter for the client? Why would Adams be allowed to be lazy and lose? How is that a winning strategy for the client?

> Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed

Well - people made Facebook rich. That was a big mistake on their behalf. Now children suffer - perhaps you should not have made Facebook rich in the first place.

> These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country.

I think Facebook should be disbanded, but I fail to see why the lawyers should consider "courts and the country". That makes no sense. Then again I also don't think corporations should have persona-rights either - the whole system is not fair.

> Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it.

Except that the rich have always gamified the system. Look at Trump.

The whole focus on Facebook here makes no sense. This is a systematic problem. Question the whole system. It is basically legal corruption.

> Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable

They know they work for evil but they get money that way. So the question is: why does evil pay so much money? The whole system is geared towards that.

> The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s

I am not sure this can be compared 1:1. Tobacco lied about cancer and smoking.

I don't think Meta faces the same problem, even if they ruin people's life. The data just isn't as clear as for smoking.

The whole article is really weak. I'd be the first to chop down Facebook, Google etc... and split these up for evil, but you need to write good articles as to why. That article seems superweak. The comparison to Big Tobacco simply don't apply 1:1. And being an evil lawyer in itself does not invalidate a case, even if their rationale for throwing out cases is also garbage.

Lawyers are intellectual prostitutes. Think about it. They will defend whatever position you pay them to defend.

Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.

I have no education in law, and know next to nothing of its practice, but I do know that a lawyer's role is not necessarily to believe their client's innocence, but to make sure the system in which they are operating is adhering to the law even if the expected outcome is a guilty verdict.

No no those are lawyers for poor people like you and me.

When we talk about lawyers for companies and billionaires it's a completely different game.

Remember last time a lawyer said they wouldn't represent facebook because they didn't necessarily believe their innocence? Right, never happened. Because on that league, the game is to twist the meaning of words so much that the judge starts to doubt he understands the law himself.

> Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_witness

> An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized (scientific, technical or other) opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion".

Thanks for reinforcing my point.

Usually both sides have an expert witness, the implications of that are self-evident. Don't even need to factor in knowledge about human nature to understand what is happening.

To be fair, the deviation from the truth an expert witness may grant tends to be bounded. Whereas the deviation a lawyer may attempt is unbounded. In many cases the bounds don't matter much as the case contains sufficient uncertainly to be a contest of spin targeted at the psychology of the jury.

What you're describing is selection bias: Obviously I'm going to choose an engineer that agrees with me, and I'm not going to bring one that doesn't agree with me. But I'm not allowed to pay him to defend a side.

With lawyers, paying to defend a side is the whole point.

I'd be happy if Meta's Legal Team withholds its legal duties. Asking them to be ethical is a huge /s.

Related headline: Water wet

As the popular practice shows, the first and only duty of a for-profit company is to create returns for shareholders.

If you do that ethically, fine. If you're not sure if it's ethical, try anyways. If it's unethical, do it. If it's illegal, do the cost-benefit analysis of what the punishment would cost the shareholders.

That's how these people think, and it's a direct threat to the liberty and well-being of our society.

EDIT: Downvote me all you want, but look around. That's how many of the people at the top of companies think as evidenced by their companies' behavior.

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (John Adams)

We, for better or worse, got rid of those things.

People can downvote my original comment all they want, but understand, that is the mindset of people like Mark Zuckerberg. Make money any way possible.

> the first and only duty of a for-profit company is to create returns for shareholders

That's a choice, not a law of nature. We can make law that changes that. Individual executives can push back. Society at large can change norms and expectations.

Why would we choose the nightmare world where profit must come first?

The only reason you hear this argument deployed seriously is when the person saying it has their own motivations for wanting profit to be supreme.

I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying "this is how the people in charge think".

What I meant in that last sentence is that the powerful don't really think that. It's a line they trot out when they want to justify why some company must do the thing that they want it to. The same powerful people are happy to ignore shareholder supremacy when it conflicts with their desires. Then suddenly it's "the CEO has to have the leeway to make long term decisions" or "The company is committed to supporting the national security mission" or whatever is convenient.

You are getting downvoted because your intent is burried in the third line.

Readers reading the first sentence are probably downvoting immediately thinking that's your PoV.

So we've gone from not reading the link to not even reading the comment?

I think the whole idea of holding a platform responsible for what users do is extremely unethical. Especially in this case, it's not even Meta's platform. It's Roblox. Meta's providing the hardware and app store here.

If the laws make Meta somehow possibly responsible for child abuse happening on Roblox, and the legal team protects them from this, I think the legal team is on the ethical side.

> Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable

Wow. Just wow.

> Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.”

> On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.” [emphasis mine]

Yes, the lawyers are totally in the clear here.

> Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.”

We need brutal, public executions for people like this.

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