Hacker News Reader

Comment by hax0ron3 | Hacker News Reader

So if I write a book that your kid just can't stop reading it over and over again because I deliberately made it compulsively re-readable, and then your kid develops some kind of issues because my book is so interesting to him, you can sue me and win?

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.

View on HN

Agreed, this is just setting the stage for requiring age verification (and surveillance) under the pretense of "saving the children".

If you can get sued for $16B for not having age verification then it's already required.

This is the part all the articles are glossing over. If the settlement terms include age (identity) verification, this is a big loss for everyone's privacy. The plaintiffs will take this template and apply it to other networks like Discord and push to normalize id collection everywhere.

I agree, I should be allowed to give children my amazing crystal meth, it's such an untapped market.

There's a law against that. There's currently no law against making a website so fun that kids will waste all their time playing with it if their parents let them.

And how did we create the law against giving children crystal meth in the first place? At a certain point in time, there was no law against it.

How? Certainly not by judicial fiat.

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.

It's established that exposing children to bad things causes harm. This isn't specific to technology. "Free speech" isn't a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children.

"Free speech" is definitely a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children. That's why there's no law on the topic; the Child Online Protection Act was overturned, and organizations like the EFF have been opposing recent attempts (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/house-passed-kids-act-...) to pass a new one.

There's an appreciable difference between creating a compelling work within an established medium like literature and inventing a (digital) machine that exploits psychological vulnerabilities (ie intermittent reward cravings) to keep the target engaged.

> 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.

Yup! I hate meta too but this case wasn’t the right way to take them down. Glad they got away with it.

I don't think this has to do with free speech. If companies can deliberately harm kids, they should be regulated.

This isn't regulation. If it was regulation, Meta could just read the regulation and comply and they'd be in the clear. This is the judicial branch making up and enforcing regulations that don't exist based on their own personal opinions about what causes "harm". No way to know what you need to do to comply until after you're already getting sued.

> personal opinions about what causes "harm " Source that it was their personal opinion?

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?

So if a person at your company claims you're "causing harm" in a vague, indirect way that's not explicitly against the law, you're legally obligated to both agree with them and change your whole business model to accommodate that? Apparently yes, but I personally think that's pretty dumb.

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.

What in ? > Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.

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?

What were they legally required to do after their research uncovered this "causal evidence" in your opinion? Shut down?

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.

Yeah, and all you perverts stop telling Grok to produce kiddie porn, because Elon is a free speech absolutist who absolutely believes in his own free speech, and your own personal responsibility to close his kiddie porn generation app. So if somebody uses it to generate pictures of your children, you can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com