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Comment by timmg | Hacker News Reader

It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.

I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.

I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.

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Internal memos have shown that they knew children were becoming addicted and didn't take steps to reduce harm where possible, hence the lawsuit.

Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.

>I'm not sure who should be responsible.

If the lawsuit is about children getting addicted to your apps, who else could be held responsible? The children?

I think it's highly unlikely to be 100% innocent.

The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.

And also, does it really matter if it was on purpose or not, the end effect is that same, purposefully designing addictive patterns meant to make people spend more time on it, regardless of the mental health of the person.

I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".

The definition of innocent you two are using here is absurd to me. This is, at best, willful negligence. No one sat down and drew up a plan for the child screen addiction machine, maybe, but they noticed they were making it many times and chose to continue.

I agree, but I think even the parent poster's generous definition of "innocent" is a very low bar Facebook still can't jump over.

When you are C-suite, every comment you make is a legal statement. The big concern (usually) is misleading shareholders.

> every comment you make is a legal statement

Every comment people can prove you made.

They learned putting it in email isn't ideal, for that reason.

https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/steve-jobs-told-g...

I'm sure these days when Apple and Google want to set up this sort of clearly illegal deal, their CEOs meet in person, or at least use phone/Signal.

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