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Comment by 59percentmore | Hacker News Reader

The point of a fine is to change behavior. It's not outsize if it's enough to do that.

>If this fine remains, and Meta pays out to the affected parties, these kids could end up rewarded with thousands of dollars for just for having a Facebook or Instagram account.

Good. https://www.thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee...

These platforms are so profitable precisely because they fleece users for way more value vis a vis their data than they get back in service utility. Balancing that equation is the right thing to do.

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I feel like you skipped the next sentence from GP. This type of award might not balance the equation the way you think it does.

I understand now that this line

>and Meta pays out to the affected parties

probably won't come to pass, which I agree is not nearly as good. But I was responding to that possibility, as put forward by the the parent.

The line you conveniently skipped is

> Which creates some bizarre incentives

One would argue the kids got paid for finding a dangerous place and entering. Up to the building owner to prevent access. It’s a form of giant bug bounty.

I wish I’d be paid a 7k$ bounty for every website where I can find an underage vulnerability.

The key thing is these people will get older and no longer be in that age bracket so you are relying on future groups in that age bracket to know this loophole which will be some but far fewer I suspect.

The status quo is already bizarre. Meta is actively profiting from harming minors. The alternative (minors getting a payout by visiting harmful websites) seems pretty tame by contrast, and in fact puts an active incentive on Meta to stop letting minors be harmed by their software.

The inverse incentive is what's in place today: a platform actively harming the users who signed up for it, in pursuit of ad dollars. The incentive is to extract maximum revenue while disregarding the real-world effects of actions, including driving children to self-harm or mental illness.

That's bizarre. But I know for some people, it doesn't seem bizarre, and just seems like "capitalism."

The platform isn't actively harming. It's actively driving them to content they engage with. What they're choosing to engage with is harmful. The fact their parents let them on the platform is the crazy part, but the state already extracts vast amounts of money from them.

Governments regulate all sorts of things that could be handled by the parents. However it works better setting a standard via regulation.

The world is moving to regulate these companies due to the harm they are causing.

> The platform isn't actively harming.

> It's actively driving them to content they engage with

Regardless of whether or not that content is harmful or not

Why punish S.E. Massengill? It’s the parents, after all, who willingly allowed their children to drink sulfanilamide. Hell, if the children simply closed their mouths when the spoon is in front of them, they’d be perfectly fine!

This is a silly comparison. Social media doesn't instantly kill your children, and we've known it's bad for them for ages now so parents have had time to adjust. Give kids devices, win stupid prizes.

I just saw an ad for Instagram's teen features, aimed at parents. You can't advertise for your product and then say that people are using it of their own volition. We are right back to the 90s and Big Tobacco.

Lots of hidden variables in this equation, like the number of ex-parents living only for retribution.

If this ruling results in Meta fully withdrawing from New Mexico because it's unlikely they'll actually net on a per customer basis than nothing of value will be lost.

Yes but Meta is being rewarded for harming children currently. So you're arguing, in fact, that we should not give kids money as restitution because it would create a bad "incentive" for them, rather than disincentivize the company that has already brought them harm from further harming them?

> The point of a fine is to change behavior. It's not outsize if it's enough to do that.

This is definitely not true, or legal. Would a billion dollar fine for speeding change some behaviors? Yes. Is it completely out of proportion? Also yes. There’s a reason punitive damages are capped. Yeah one way to stop bad corporate behavior is fining them into insolvency, but that doesn’t really help anyone unless the company is purely net negative. And those companies tend to die on their own, since you won’t get a lot of revenue if you don’t provide someone value.

>>"Would a billion dollar fine for speeding change some behaviors? Yes. Is it completely out of proportion? Also yes."

Maybe not the best example, since Finland does asses speeding fines based on income. So a 1bn fine would be appropriate if someone was ludicrously wealthy, although I'm not sure there's anyone rich enough on the planet to hit that mark. But for example, this guy [0] got a €54,000 speeding ticket in 2015. Honestly, this seems like a pretty good system. Would someone like Jeff Bezos even notice a speeding ticket in the US? The only real annoyance to him would be getting pulled over, the fine amounts to literal seconds of income. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that fines and legal penalties should be in proportion to the income of the person or company they are being assessed against. Otherwise, you end up with the problem of legal penalties just becoming part of doing business, and ideally they should be changing behavior.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

Can't remember where I saw it but some years back someone wrote something like "if the punishment for a crime is financial then it only deters poor people" which makes sense.

In the past, it has been humorously and falsely attributed to a Final Fantasy game.

Even a few tens of billions in fines doesn't come close to putting Meta into insolvency. The histrionics are entirely uncalled for.

A billion dollar fine is entirely unnecessary to dissuade a typical driver from speeding. The fine needs to be enough to change the behavior, not 500,000,000% that amount.

Meta is worth $1.5T while most of us getting tickets are worth less than $200K. Meta brings in $200B/yr. Taking 10% of that, even 20%, would hardly slow the company down in most of its business.

I think 15% of revenue per year of uncorrected behavior is about the right amount. After a few years of that, I'd wager Meta would start to change how it treats children, probably by screwing over adults even more, but that's fine with me. Adults get what they deserve. Children deserve better than being handed over to a mega-corporation for monetization.

My point is that saying “there is no unreasonable fine if it works” is naive absolutism. Even with proportional fines, does fining someone 99% of their income count as too high? If proportionality is irrelevant than there is no way to differentiate which crimes deserve what punishments.

It depends. Does fining someone 99% of their income make it impossible for them to live with basic dignity? There are many, many people for which it wouldn't, especially if you limit to W2 income (as so many income-based tests do).

I've long been of the opinion that the focus on "how much is being taken" is wrongheaded, and pushed primarily to advantage elites. What about, "how much are you left with?" Now, suddenly, it's in their best interests for the popular understanding of "enough to live on" to be quite high.

If we're talking perverse incentives, we are currently living in a regime worse than many of the alternatives.

> Yes. Is it completely out of proportion

Maybe not if the speeder is Mark Zuckerberg. If you have 200 billion, any fine substantially less than a billion might not modify your behavior.

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