If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.
The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are complicit in acting in a company that is actively seeking to control a populous.
I understand it's hard not to work for "big tech" and not work for a company trying to control populous.
So yes. I agree. Stop letting them play games with the rules we spent generations putting in place to protect our citizenship.
Get your pillow ready, because this is the only thing that'll happen if the verdict goes against them. Of course, the verdict could go the other way so no fine is levied at all. Maybe get a second pillow just in case
More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.
You may need this: https://eathealthy365.com/learn-to-scream-like-a-pro-the-def...
+1.
Meta owns WhatsApp, which is core infrastructure in many countries now where it has basically replaced the PSTN. If WhatsApp went down without a long transition process first, it would take myriad small businesses down with it. I would love to see harsh punishments and jailed executives, but the world still needs the company for the time being.
If the collapse of Twitter is any indication, it might just drive people to even worse and more exploitative platforms instead.
It’s not meta’s contribution to the world. It can be cleanly extracted from the company. Or a replacement created if need be.
Not everyone has SEO-fu, and hiring a contractor is an additional cost for small businesses. At least on Facebook one normally finds what one is looking for.
Angie's List started out this way but I think it has been corrupted since the merger with HomeAdvisor. I could be wrong about that.
Establishing trust would be the tricky part. People are so used to 80% of the internet being scams and clickbait. But that certainly goes for Facebook pages as well.
The transition mechanism is that your contacts are in your phone address book, and you can call or text them or find them on other platforms indexed by phone number. Although, not for username contacts.
Would it be disruptive? Yes. Would it be world ending? No.
Launch two parallel cases. One against Meta top execs for criminal behavior, the other one as antitrust against Meta for abusing their market position. Two cases at once gives you negotiating power and clearly signals that you're serious about curtailing their influence.
Ideally this results in jail time for Meta execs, but at a minimum divesting them of Whatsapp should be achievable. By the end you should be able to get Meta's businesses operating independently under new leadership.
> but the world still needs the company for the time being.
You have been caught hook, line and sinker. Flush the koolaid out of your system. I can absolutely guarantee you that if all of Meta disappears tomorrow, everyone will move over to a like-for-like replacement within weeks. I'd be willing to bet everything I have on it.
The world absolutely does not need Meta, period.
1. Perpetual existence means breaking the law is a short term problem that is well worth the long term benefit — companies essentially live for ever and out live many of the consequences of their actions
2. They can’t be physically jailed and are rarely punished with equivalent restrictions. There is no ankle bracelet for bad companies. So the punishments are inadequate to serve as a deterrent,
3. Fines are rarely of a scale that threatens existence so they become just another cost of business that can be financially modeled
4. The decision makers almost never suffer the consequences of their companies actions. It’s so rare at this point for executives to face personal responsibility in terms of fines, or jail time that there is a absolute incentive to ignore laws in pursuit of short term earnings
5. There is a two tier system, large companies can abuse the legal process by outspending prosecution from the government or harmed parties. Law suits drag on so long that it’s essential a get out of jail free card for companies that are large enough.
6. It’s pretty clear the government wants Facebook to spy on and persuade the population of the world. So this behavior is a “national defense” asset and any harm is justified as being necessary for the preservation of that asset.
I could go on but until most of these are fixed, expect Facebook in particular to evade any meaningful punishment.
It absolutely does not but people keep repeating this on social media
> > It absolutely does not but people keep repeating this on social media
Funny how some folks can comment here on the world's biggest library and communications system but they can't take a minute to search out and read some actual details on the thing they're commenting about first. For example, Wikipedia's Corporate Personhood article [1] took me less than 5 seconds to find (including the time it took to open a web browser to my favorite search engine), and another two seconds to read enough to find that the very first sentence says some (not all) legal rights... The rest of the article has all the details anyone needs to understand what that first sentence actually means.
> Notion that corporations can have some legal rights, responsibilities and accountability (emphasis mine)
Corporate personhood does not mean a company have all the same legal rights as a person. Did you notice that companies can’t vote in elections or plead the fifth amendment like a person can? Corporations only get some rights.
Corporate personhood is common across the globe. If you thought it was an American idea that’s completely incorrect. It is a funny example of the kind of American exceptionalism where people assume that America is an exception in having some property they dislike when in fact it’s common everywhere.
The US does jail CEOs who commit crimes. Social media just has a short memory for topics like Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, or even recent topics like Theranos and FTX.
You may also have your personal list of “societal damages” that you believe should result in people being jailed despite not having committed crimes, but I guarantee your list doesn’t match everyone else’s list. You wouldn’t be happy when the list of “societal damages” started extending to things like using a VPN or trying to be anonymous on the internet, but for many people who get to government positions it most definitely would!
Even more incredible damage has been in us losing the laws that protect us in the first place. For nigh on 40 years thanks to neoliberal economists influencing policy we have been relaxing corporate and monetary regulation.
This has already provided great gifts to the world, such as enabling the fraud that led to the 2008 housing crisis (who was jailed again?).
When as a country you decide that punishing bad corporate behaviour is a non starter, you get the predictable consequences of increasing, not decreasing bad corporate behaviour.
What specific laws would cause Mark Zuckerberg to go to jail?
The US doesn't jail people according to the law and does not have a legal system you want to imitate.
> The US does jail CEOs who commit crimes. Social media just has a short memory for topics like Worldcom, Enron, Tyco, or even recent topics like Theranos and FTX.
Yes, the US jails CEOs that defraud investors, i.e. the powerful. This is a direct application of the fuzzy concepts that the US uses when deciding whether to jail someone.
Also the board and anyone who's ever held more than 1% of the stock.
I thought they were pushing for on-device age verification, which from a "mass surveillance" perspective is pretty bad? If you wanted mass surveillance, you'd want mandatory ID verification by sites and/or government SSO, both of which allows you to capture a persistent identifier. Of course, meta isn't doing all this lobbying out of altruism. Doing on-device verification means they're off the hook for it, and google/apple has the shoulder the burden instead.