Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
reuters.com
reuters.com
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".
Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.
That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.
That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
It probably can't be eliminated completely, but if they slowly make it illegal for young people to start the habit it can be reduced
So vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters.
Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.
Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.
If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!
Also proof that people did die from respiratory failure due to propylene glycol inhaling?
You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.
I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.
Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.
It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.
Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.
My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").
That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.
I hope I've cleared up your confusion.
It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.
Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?
We don't know.
We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.
We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.
I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.
So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!
I saw way more smoking 10-20 years ago. All have quit now.
I see a good amount vape but rarely see cigarettes these days
What country?
In a lot of the US, smoking sections still existed in restaurants then.
Just checked my home town, some bans were enacted in 2014 and existing restaurants and bars are still grandfathered in!
For the 11-15 group as a whole it dropped from 11% to 1.2%
Vaping in that 11-15 group was 5% in 2023
So combined smoking and vaping in young people halved from 11% in 2000 to 6% in 2023, almost all of which is vaping
https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Youth-Smoking-Fact-Sheet.pdf
https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-...
The business model, incentives, and practices that led them down this road? No, those don't need to change.
Have all the age restriction you want. A kid goes into the store with their lunch money (a few days worth) and they have a valid phone number and an unrestricted device.
Everything requires ID to use? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I agree.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
They literally don’t care.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
Tiktok and YouTube are going to cannibalize Meta.
For rich people, fines are just the price of doing things
Facebook was already immensely popular a decade before that.
ftfy
Inexcusable behaviour and Meta needs to be skinned. These measures are a joke.
So meta won.
The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
Unless we make sure in print to specify "Meta, the company found to have harmed children, …".
Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).
Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.
But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.
And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)
And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.
And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.
And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch
No addiction, no infinite scroll, no exhaustion, no casino-like mechanics, no endorphins, no political rage, no AI companions, no random posts, no influencers.
We've stayed in touch with eachother's social groups via various means of communication since antiquity without social media algorithms.
We need to re-normalize not knowing what is going on in someone else's life 24/7, and re-normalize not having 24/7 instant access to another person. It's not healthy.
Also, text messages don't need an instant response, nor should the other party expect an instant response. It's asynchronous communication for a reason!
does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.
so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.
that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.
in more detail: Largely no.
Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.
This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.
The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.
A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.
It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.
Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.
Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.
Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.
They do not want to give you the best digital experience you can have, they want to give you the most addictive and exploitative digital experience they can legally get away with because they value the money that brings in more than they value anything else. They'll be content to see you hurt or killed if it makes them more money. They've knowingly been hurting and killing people, including children, for money. Meta, and the corporations like it, have leveraged all of their vast resources against the average person and the average person is always going to lose in that situation.
As in an experience so tuned to our hind brains that we are enraptured, past our ability to be concerned or switch off.
I’m being minimal in my invective and generous in my choice of words.
There is no fair fight against a corporation for an individual.
but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...
also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.
and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)
the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)
https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...
HN isn't optimized daily for engagement like FB and IG are. There isn't a single image, or video on website. Ads (for YC companies) sometimes show up and are rare. Color scheme-wise it is very plain (and should stay like that). HN is not hidden behind login wall. It is not tracking you. You can access HN fully anonymously, and create throwaway accounts for posting.
the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.
I would say hn is in a group of systems that include Facebook.
It's true that contemporary commercial social media tends to be associated with these big corporate services that have already been thoroughly enshittified.
But they didn't start out that way - and alternatives are possible and desirable (hn, lobste.rs, many niche forums, IRC channels, discord servers[d] etc are proofs by example).
Maybe a loose definition would be communication system that leverage the network effect?
And good social media aligns with the end-user, and bad aligns with user-hostile forces?
[d]: (I don't particularly like discord, but it is much closer to a tool that does what I want: connect with people - than something like tick-tock or Facebook as it exists today)
>> Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
I'd argue it isn't similar in an important way, people cannot opt out of eating entirely. Overeaters must eat. People who can't control themselves with social media do not need to use them at all.
Facebook is useful for bigger communities like moms groups. We found babysitters that way.
One of my social clubs tried to skip out of social media and was originally meeting in person, calling each other etc, but information just fell through the cracks as the club got larger.
Big tech literally has fingers in every single pie imaginable and it's real money for a lot of people, unfortunately.
Honestly speaking I would not be in a leadership position for my Toastmasters groups if I needed to call each individual member every week as my other Toastmaster club does. That probably says something about me, but I'm sure many other folks would have a similar outlook.
If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.
For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.
That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.
Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008
As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.
Yes. I've stopped Facebook and Instagram, and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube. I've failed to cut those out as well. The addiction is a lot stronger than we'd all like to assume in my opinion.
I don't disagree with you at all, but doesn't this go against what most people are claiming in this thread (that Meta products are uniquely engineered to be addictive, to a significant degree)? Hacker News doesn't have any especially "addictive" features. They don't make money off this site, there's no ads, there's no personalized algorithm, no promotion of ragebait, etc. Yet plenty of us use it day after day or find ourselves distracted by it.
Youtube is more obviously addictive, but it's hardly social media. It's just media.
Meta has done a lot of harm in the world, don't get me wrong, but I think people are stretching a bit when they act like none of these technologies would be addictive on their own if not for the company's design.
Meta is the one being sued currently, obviously they are the biggest one, and have tried even harder to keep users coming back in addictive ways, and likely targeted children more directly.
I'd say HackerNews also has better moderation where they actively will remove ragebait, where Meta services often encourages it.
I see your general point though, but I don't think people act like these technologies wouldn't be addictive separate from some corporate endorser. A homemade cigarette is still an addictive cigarette, but that doesn't stop you from suing and regulating tobacco companies.
The other question you might raise is, what alternative isn't addictive? I think many have said that feeds should simply be chronological, same for comments. Instead of upvote/downvote, there should be reviews (score how much you liked the video/article), and users could sort by review score as well. You shouldn't be allowed to push content that users didn't explicitly subscribed too (ads should be ads on the side, not promoted content injected into your feed for example). And so on. Is it too restrictive, maybe, I think it's an interesting debate to have though, like what do we lose/gain making it less addictive, and what is actually less addictive?
So why don't you just override your monkey brain that hordes of clever people trick in to scrolling more? Why don't you just get all of your social circle to move off Meta? Why don't you just use Ebay over FB Marketplace? Why don't you just convince your housing development to use something other than WhatsApp for sharing equipment? Why don't you just find a different channel through which to promote your small business? Why don't you just accept to be a social outcast?
The vast, vast majority can't pay that price.
And yes, some programmer somewhere has his programmer friends in Matrix. And no, that doesn't work beyond that very case. Why is this so hard to understand?
Filter-tipped instead of unfiltered cigarettes basically.
As for restricting nighttime usage and imposing daily limits, somehow my mom managed to do that (for video games) without any corporate features in the 90s, while being a single working mother. One time when I was particularly uncooperative she just went to the electrical panel and shut off the power to my room. That worked like a charm. Today, there are all kinds of parental control features instead.
However, how can you expect people to do parenting, when grown adults are apparently not even capable of basic self-regulation?
Even construed more broadly, this makes no sense. All of these cases and the criticism hinge on harms of addiction, that pretty much by definition apply primarily to those with poor self-regulation. Those with proper self-regulation need them much less - so it's basically paternalism. Supposedly some people don't know what's best for them, they are "addicted" to watching cat videos. As, again, is obvious in this case, since the case is literally about children.
I, personally, like infinite scroll algo reels. I probably spend about 20 minutes a week on them, and if anything I'd prefer the algo to be more tailored / "addictive" cause it tends to over focus quickly and bore me. It sure sucks at addicting me. I don't want the state to interfere with what FB can or cannot do with the algo. If an adult gets addicted to reels, they are definitely not a victim.
Wait...I'm in tech and I'm begging you to share how. Is there a way on iOS?
I've mostly just stopped using these apps.
The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.
I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.
What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".
Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...
I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.
Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.
I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.
It's hard to do similarly high quality studies today because no one rolls social media out gradually anymore.
>I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom".
If you have an argument to make then do so.
> Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.
where you compare the loss of freedom from school to the loss of freedom from Facebook
I am saying that school is a lack of freedom, therefore his assertion is wrong.
This is quite relevant when we're talking about depression in children. Eg from looking at South Korea we can see that the education system itself can be a cause of depression in kids, meaning that it's likely depressive in our countries too (just less than in SK).
I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.
It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.
So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
Well:
(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;
(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;
(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to
(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.
In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.
This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.
In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.
No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.
For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.
In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.
> Why not also in the social media case?
The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.
> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Doing nothing seems fine!
Everyone is just such a 'big tech bad' sheep now. Pitchforks out.
Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?
But as someone else put it once regarding global warming, what's the worst case if we reign in social media anyway? That we make the Internet a less addictive place for nothing?
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-.... Archive version: https://archive.is/wY1OH
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
[1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
I don't see YouTube as a streaming service - more as a social(ish) video sharing/Indy publishing platform.
For things like conference talks or training techniques and so on.
If I had to watch ads, I'd stop using it.
In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.
Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.
If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?
But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.
(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)
No amount of money can fix that or punish them.
I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated that.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Social media is manipulation. Period.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
I never said that it wasn't reprehensible.
Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.
Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.
It's really hard to disentangle Meta's actions with the overall push for maximum-profit-at-any-cost mentality of most societies we live in.
On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.
No. "Just" is understating the effect.
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put
Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.
There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.
we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
kids today..
"of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable" - Plato
Hm, odd. I didn't know parents didn't have authority or agency. Good to know.
Good to know how childless you are, or fortunate enough to grow helicopter wings.
The grift is strong when the marks are the fault. Black people are also at fault for living in a ghetto and getting addicted to crack served by the CIA in the 80s.
Yes, yes, it's all the addicts fault.
Please stay on topic lest everyone get confused by your nonsense about unrelated topics.
People like you really do make the comments on HN quite bad. Do better!
As someone who graduated high school just before Facebook became a thing: it's always been like this. For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram just meant you could now seek affirmation from a larger community than your local community.
While there's definitely some harm with social media (comparing yourself to a perfectly curated profile) there's also plenty of benefits (it's democratized advertising, news, made it easier for small businesses to reach customers, etc...).
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
What more are you looking for?
Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.
A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.
A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.
Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.
I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.
> You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already does that.
Initially read this as "can't install apps which facilitate privacy."
And that was before I got to your next sentence . . .
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
Companies keep getting away with this "cost of doing business" fines, the justice department keeps failing at its duties.
The fines either need to wipe out these companies to the point the share holders hold the leadership accountable or nothing will change.
Just like how Meta, it's staff and leadership all knew they were making decisions that harmed people, and did nothing to stop it while profiting immensely.
There are multiple studies showing that social media use leads to worse mental health in users.
It can be argued the changes don't go far enough so maybe "pay fine, reduce harm, but harm still permitted..."
it all became clear as day.
apparently in the 70s used car salesmen would manipulate the odometers in cars they were selling to make the cars appear to have really low mileage. they would also do other random stuff like put saw dust in the transmission to hide any kind of knocking noises.
the media started doing investigations into this which led to laws making those kind of things illegal.
they had tons of interviews with various owners of the car lot chains who were eventually found guilty of things like rolling back odometers. and every single one of them sounded sleazy and confident. every single one of these guys who were caught red handed blamed the buyers saying things like:
“it’s not my fault they bought a shit car.”
we allowed a bunch of greasy slimey used car salesmen to take over. slimey used car salesmen in quarter-zips who sound confident.
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
The point is "Market cap is BS".
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
Diluting existing shareholders by 10% would send a much stronger message than whatever's happening now.
The shareholders already can't remove Zuckerberg, he has 57% of voting control.
And by diluting all shareholders it depresses the price in the future.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
So was Tesla until it wasn't: https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2024/06/1...
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
First, that would be communism, and second, what would the government be able to use that for?
That would be news to all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
> what would the government be able to use that for?
Even if the government didn't have such a fund, it could sell all the shares at once. Or slowly over time.
Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.
I do personally believe banning the algorithms begins to fall into the realm of free speech regulation. I can hate the algorithm crap without thinking the government should regulate the internet.
In the starkest of terms: Americans have to somehow reconcile faith in the power of an invidual's freedom of speech and the manipulation of the collective marketplace of ideas.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).
Even if we assume children don't find a way around this, they will simply switch to a different social media app after their two hours are up, or switch to an app that doesn't have the two hour limit at all.
This is clearly a rule that would have to be mandated by the government, or perhaps parental controls on their devices (not sure why parenting was ruled out here apparently). Same with whatever opinions people have on an algorithm showing you content you'd enjoy, which has always been the goal of media since the concept of a magazine was created, they just didn't have the right tools available.
It also will only punish kids who actually gave their age no? That's not actually required (yet) to sign up for a social media app. I was probably 9 when I started clicking a random year for my age when signing up. Doesn't take you long to figure out you have to jump through hoops when your honest.
Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
Like imagine if they all flock to 4chan, or similar.
This system encourages gamifying replies by creating content that elicits strong fear, anger, or excitement responses, or opinions or media so shocking that it’s impossible not to interact with them. Combined with a lax free-speech policy, you get a website that reinforces the nastiest, most unsanitized content, often far-removed from reality, which can exacerbate mental illness or depression among vulnerable populations.
While other social media platforms also encourage their creators to exploit fear, anger, or excitement, leaning too heavily on emotionality without being acceptable to your audience can cause your post to be buried or underperform. Emotional engagement is only one factor in success, alongside the like-to-dislike ratio, watch time, creator reputation, and palatability to advertisers. If you post, e.g., an emotionally provocative YouTube video that completely dismantles your audience’s preexisting conception of you (a leftist posting a right-wing video), the video will likely be dislike-bombed and thus unable to climb very far in the algorithm, while your reputation will be tarnished among your hardcore fans. Even on a more pseudo-anonymous platform like Reddit, going too far against the grain of a subreddit will get your post downvoted and hidden from anyone not sorting by new, and probably deleted by the mods.
4chan doesn’t have these issues. Even if you are outside the Overton window of a specific board, as long as the post has enough substance to fuel outrage (there is a difference between cheap outrage and more visceral, long-lasting outrage that can only be created by someone intimately familiar with the subject), your post can still be successful, although you will be bombarded with racial slurs and death threats. It’s ragebait in its purest form.
Disclaimer: I have never posted on 4chan and these are just my observations from lurking.
You forgot "evil" in your description of the company.
It is supposed to realign their incentives away from massively exploiting society for purely financial gain. There is ample evidence that Meta has gone out of its way to encourage the discussed issues, so clearly there was a problem with the incentive structure. Given all the lobbying they've done to prevent any passage of laws regulating their conduct, it's fallen to the courts to correct this (if, as other comments say, somewhat unsatisfactorily).
This is pretty shady. The $17B figure is much less impressive when a huge chunk of it is hinged on competitors choosing to hurt their business.
It helps simultaneously "level the playing field" but also protects consumers.
If the courts stated ruling is hinged on consumer protection then this seems fair. Any competitor which doesn't follow suit is likely opening themselves up to a similar lawsuit which would cost a similar order of magnitude of damages (so it is in the interest of the competitors to do take these actions)
> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
So it's a bucket of crabs
Meta should be destroyed and forced to stop all operations immediately. I think it would be quite an interesting wake-up call when we would then realize that... nothing of value was lost and the world will just go on - just a little bit saner and happier.
[1](https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/META-PLATFORMS-IN...)
Share prices are weakly correlated to news events anyway, if you ask the professionals they would say it was already "priced in" that is why a news event is not moving the stock when it doesn't move, and when it does move they will it is news event causing the move.
I'm at loss for words at how shitty this paragraph reads. If anyone has any hope that Meta (and the rest) are even slightest concerned about the problem at hand (mental health of children), then they're very dim.
Meta literally goals on creating high-quality teen producers and consumers. Every single experiment, every single project is optimizing for that.
At least now its clear that behind the fancy marketing, its all "just business" for them and if they could, they'd sell the kids' soul to create "more shareholder value"
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/agreement-with-state-attor...
If a 6 year old can scroll TikTok surely they should be allowed to get a couple of shots at the bar?
In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.
It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.
If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.
* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05...
Nothing is more addicting than regular intermittent rewards. They are literally not changing anything
I've included slides showing a graphic of someone in a slot machine next to a screenshot of Instagram, and would do an activity where the children themselves drew connections of what they saw/knew. It was not difficult, and they hit it out of the park every time.
The fact that the possible damages sought was over 200 billion, and this settlement clocks in at less than ten percent of that value plus "concessions" that really at this point are just tablestakes for them product itself to just be viable given the parent backlash against these things, is incredibly disappointing. They have cost people on the periphery of this A LOT more, and from a merely business proposition, the wanton disregard for safety in this case proved to be a smart business move. The lawsuit should have had a chilling effect on anyone trying to do anything similar lately, but that will not be the case.
>The settlement resolves claims brought by 29 U.S. states, and will end a federal trial that had been one of the highest-profile tests yet of allegations that social media companies harmed young users.
>Wednesday's settlement also resolves lawsuits by California, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., over privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. Those states will receive $459.3 million to resolve those lawsuits.
that is pocket change for the company. cut some jobs, reduce some snacks, push more ads. done.
My concerns are:
1. This is an agreed settlement w/ only Meta. This no impact on YouTube, TikTok, etc, and regulators can't point at this and say "Well Meta did it, you have to to!". This isn't a law, it's a handshake[0].
2. Will (or can) this be applicable to adults. If the implementation exists, adults should be able to opt in to it as well. Adults are also subject to addiction and social harms.
3. These restrictions feel like they're about 20 seconds away from being sidestepped by the first teenager that discovers they can make multiple instagram accounts and/or use multiple devices.
[0] This sentence sounds like Claude but I promise I wrote this myself.
Why "a maximum". Do can we expect that in practice it will be much less?
Are these not the same apps
$17 billion is nothing. Should have been more like $500 billion.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...
"Meta has long argued it could not have misled consumers about whether its services were addictive because "social media addiction" is not a recognized psychiatric condition."
that's a nice escape hatch, considering that they are using all the tricks in the book (from online gambling, etc) and then some
Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
There have always been so many people having higher integrity to choose from for those possessing better judgment of character.
Edit: not my downvote btw
Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:
- “Social media use is shown to directly cause significant mental health distress, especially to children. Continue? Yes / Close / Configure allowed applications”
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
Decent portion of juries.
Just a case of Affluenza, right?!
* The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
For most of these ultrawealthy execs, I don't think it's even that moderately complex, and I don't think they really try to rationalize it to themselves. All they know in life is "number must go up" so that's all they really care about. In their positions, they don't have to listen to anyone but shareholders, and all shareholders care about is "number must go up." Some of them have PR people who sit there writing speeches that rationalize what they do in terms of some kind of nebulous good, but when they're done mouthing the words, they go back to their dashboards and all they are really working on is the numbers and making them go up.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
Overall, I didn't find either of these people unusually good or bad--they were ordinary for white-collar educated knowledge workers, with ordinary amounts of grit, greed, values, hypocrisy, and adaptive/maladaptive behaviors, to my eyes. They rationalized their having wealth with the same combination of true/false/self-serving/values-based logic that other people use to rationalize ... I dunno, not voting, or not giving money to beggars: the reasons presented are usually foils for the underlying reasons, you know?
They had to make positive results.
They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.
They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.
I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.
However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.
I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.
Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.
You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.
It makes the most sense. Especially given the “dumb fucks” quote.
Also, I’m sure Peter Thiel being one of his first major investors has something to do with it.
>Dumb fucks.
Is an attitude he never grew out of.
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
I think the word you're looking for is "sociopath."
Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.
Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits.
This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers.
They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less community oriented than Meta.
Do note: I am not giving Meta a pass. Just ensuring the system of incentives that got us here is interrogated and a better way forward is thought of.
That being said, the timescale of change in that proposed mechanism seems too slow to me given the extreme urgency I see in the climate crisis. Do you see a way out of it without systemic change? Do you not share the same assessment of urgency?
The zeroth law of economics is that wants are infinite and resources limited. Economics is the study of how subjective wants can be best fulfilled given the constraints of reality.
Meaning that markets are always designed to achieve certain outcomes, and the idea of unregulated markets that work magically is fiction.
This is why you have (had) people like Lina Khan who identified how Amazon could be anticompetitive, even if kept prices low for customers. All markets have to be tuned, policed, kept clean and rules refreshed to achieve the outcomes we want as a society.
We design markets, and have the knowledge to do it well.
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
They do think that, yes. But they're not shaping anything as they see fit, at best they're shaping as millions of other together see fit. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
It's the entropy of power. Spread that power over too many people and it becomes noise.
If I were to guess, he's thinking he can get the good (if there is any good to be found) without the bad still using more controls/technology.
The Insta Ads: Teens can set daily watch time limits.
The reality: When the teen exceeds their set daily watch time limit, the notification includes option to skip and continue watching !!!
It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.
Besides, this message came out in a lawsuit Mark lost and was not a public message. He was in a lawsuit because he stole people's ideas.
The guy still has the same heart and mind he did when he wrote this. He proves it every day.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
It’s that simple.
The guy just bought a castle in Ireland.
He's doing it so he can buy another castle, then continue to tell everyone how in-touch he is with the regular person.
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box games. If we're establishing the precedent that addiction-engineering is bad, that's a huge win for our civilization.
Pretty much the entire mobile ecosystem is a hellscape of black hat attacks on the human central nervous system. You can do it via a web browser or a desktop too but when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it.
So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.
The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.
Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.
Isn't engagement the holy grail of any startup though? What was wrong (from a legal standpoint) about what Meta did here? I hate social media as much as the next guy just curious as to the grounds on which they were brought to justice. I have seen a couple allusions to their deliberately hiding the harmful effects of their products but have yet to see any specifics.
Ok so if most individuals that care sue them it will become a.. $17B fine. Doesn't sound that impressive either.
Maybe all these state AGs knew there was a good chance of losing because the facts aren't as strong as the narrative?
The least insane general position is to always ask "Free for who to do what?"
Freedom for you to try cocaine if you want? Ok, let's consider it, but let's have a serious discussion about public health and safety first because there are predictable public consequences to broader society.
Freedom for someone to put cocaine in your food without telling you? No, that's just actually a brain-dead, immoral position.
I did not say "putting cocaine in food" is bad.
I said "putting cocaine in your food without telling you" is bad.
I mean does it?
even if you do freedom as in freedom of speech it seems somewhat diminished.
> there was a good chance of losing
now that is a good question. When a large multi-national corp offers you ~4% of yearly turnover to fuckoff, does that sound like a company confident it would win?
Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
Not really.
>Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
Instagram directly connects children with children predators. Surfacing content from one to the other.
The dishonesty of not acknowledging the existing problems with the internet, suggests we are trying to scapegoat Facebook.
Discord for example is contributing to this.
scenario 1: some interesting chemicals exist in a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa.
scenario 2: a person picks up some interesting chemicals from a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa, compiles some of them into highly addictive packaging, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward the kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents?”
surely you recognize the two situations above are not the same.
and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip who confidently says “it’s not my fault they bought the shit car.”
The comment I’m replying to:
> still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds
the situation you put forth and the situation in reality are two entirely different outcomes.
removing a bunch of relevant context doesn’t magically make them the same thing.
It is incredibly naive to believe so
It is like contending with that monstrous child from the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life".
It's good what you did to those children, Mark. And it's a good thing you paid billions in hush money, too.
I don't like that idea. Personally, I value free speech more than some supposed "harms" done to children by content. Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
I'm not saying I'm against passing laws on this subject. My point is that no such laws currently exist, but a bunch of lawyers and judges just decided Facebook owes $17B for breaking these non-existent laws anyway.
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
And no I haven't read all the details, it's an extremely broad settlement that apparently covers everything from vague allegations of harm caused by social media addiction to Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data obtained through Facebook's API. There are too many claims to investigate all of them individually in detail without making that a full time job, so I'm speaking in broad terms here about how I think our legal system ought to function.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion about this specific situation.
> Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
No, because unfortunately our legal system doesn't work the way I'm saying it should. If someone feels you have injured them in some way, they can sue you even if you acted in good faith and broke no laws, and if they can demonstrate harm, even indirect harm, they have a good chance of winning. It makes for a very unstable legal environment.
> Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
If staying away from social media is this trivial to you I applaud your self discipline but googling 'social media addiction' suggests a very real phenomenon where people, children and adults alike, often find themselves incapable of self regulating their usage.
Not sure that it matters though, because Instagram and WhatsApp are still in everyone's pockets. Even in hippie circles, they're almost mandatory to stay connected.
Meta employees should be accountable for this. And stock buyers too.
You could choose to work elsewhere. You could choose to invest in something else.
Many here are shocked when a company does not observe GNU licensing, but are OK working, using or investing in such an evil organization.
Why is that?
Its not enough. Shut them down.
Look, I get that certain demographics are terrified of another Arthur Andersen-esque collapse of a firm, but if we don’t punish companies to the point of possible insolvency, then we’re creating a moral hazard wherein more companies will continue engaging in harmful behavior because they know they won’t ever be held properly accountable.
If we actually harmed (or even bankrupted) Meta with a suitable fine relative to the harms inflicted, you’d see the wider social media industry (and adjacent tech companies) clean up their shit really fucking fast to avoid a similar fate.
Personally idgaf about them - I feel they contribute. But I want to know what you think.
On the one hand, I think destroying Meta and social media in its current form would be a net good; same with fossil fuel companies.
Though you raise an issue (“what about folks whose livelihoods depend on the harm perpetuated”) rather than reject the premise using such reasoning, which is the absolute right attitude to have. It’s easy to sit on my high horse and tut-tut folks reliant on Facebook Marketplace or Gas Station Convenience Store shifts for their livelihoods, but that’s not helping jack shit. Personally, I believe part of the punishment should be leveraging the fines or damages collected to build social support systems for genuine victims - which includes working class folks who had to choose between starving/homelessness or survival. I lack the policy expertise to make specific pitches, but we do need to keep those folks in mind as a means of learning from Arthur Andersen and Enron: punish those creating the harm, while helping those who were casualties of the collapse but not directly complicit themselves.
It’s hard. It’s complex. Some folks will fall through the gaps due to our abysmal social safety nets. That being said, those numbers are infinitely smaller than the folks harmed by social media in its current form, and thus the trade is a net good.
Using this new problem to justify not addressing the current one is the worst move we could make.
No industry this large, will be without second and third degree effects.
17B is cheap compared to changing the laws being exploited.
META won this one hands down.
Is this a different case from the $1.5 trillion suit against them?
A bit like millionaires who park illegally because "it only cost $100 to park here, and my PA will do the admin"
Time and time again it’s the same story: the Protestant worship of money and wealth at the expense of others. If it makes money then it’s a blessing from God, and thus cannot be evil.
Sorry, Americans, but your children will be mind raped with social media and pornography to grow the GDP. Don’t put up a fight: the government has their back. And an army.
And after all, we are all sinners in a world of an angry god…
Fuck WASPs.
If we assume that the median income for a Meta employee/board member is 100 kUSD then that 16 GUSD is 160 000 man years. 16 000 people should go to jail for 10 years instead. And that should include everyone at the top.