Did Meta's Big Settlement Actually Help It?
nytimes.com
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Parents need to tell their kids to put the phone down.
Instead they abnegate this duty, and lawyers treat Facebook like a money piñata.
Doritos make people fat, so why shouldn't we sue Frito Lay for billions?
Cars allow you to drive fast and crash, let's sue carmakers.
And so on...
Our justice system is just one big scam. It finds a big, rich corporation, greedy plaintiffs looking for a lottery ticket, and a "jury of peers" in friendly jurisdiction.
Facebook sucks but if your child is addicted to their phone take the phone away.
The litigation lottery our legal system has devolved into is a total joke. This is a nightmare for second and third order effects.
That would be one thing except for Facebook's tendency to ban you, for any reason, while the horrific thing (like that, for example) you report is never taken down ever
That doesn't mean we can't also hold tobacco companies accountable, but it's wild to me to suggest that parents don't bear the bulk of the responsibility here.
Should they be sued for billions and trillions of dollars for that? At some point it's our job to not give in if things feel nice but are bad for us
I actually do agree that there need to be draconian regulations on social media apps for children but those laws don't exist, it's a failure of congress to not create them, but no you can't start pursuing criminal charges for laws that don't exist, that is how countries collapse.
While parents have some control, they don't have as much control as you think. It is a constant, "but my friends can do this", and you have to deal with it all the time.
Parents now have to work 2 jobs, so the kid spends most of their time outside of home.
Also, comparing FB to cars, doritos is not fair imo, FB is closer to crack. It can also be accessed on other devices than phones, WHICH they need for school. Not every parent knows how to block it, and kids find ways around road blocks anyway.
If your kid is addicted to crack cocaine, they have a problem that is light-years further down the road to existential harm than a similar problem with Doritos or social media.
I don't have children, but I was a child and I know parents.
It's not a given that a child has this type of 2 way negotiation/bargaining power in the home, let alone the freedom to speak their mind towards their parents.
I can't really disagree with that, but I still wonder why it's okay to use the same addictive methods on adults. To me it doesn't matter if it's children or adults, not if you know this will harm people and you still do it.
It's extremely weird you're allowed to actively built in addictive properties to your product, in an attempt to make users stay. If it was a side effect which happens get a certain (low) percentage addicted that's one thing, but to actively seek out the properties is another. Again, especially when you know that it causes psychological damage and destabilizes communities. How the hell Zuckerberg, Meta management and shareholders sleep at night is beyond me.
Well, for Zuck, it's because he likely has a severe personality disorder.
For management, it's money.
For shareholders, it's the combination of money and the fact that they can't really hold Zuckerberg accountable. He has a majority of voting shares for the company, so there's nothing any of them can really do other than sell. The problem is, if someone with any large amount of shares sells, then there's a chance that there's a panic, and they get in a position where they can't sell all of the shares and the ones they kept have dropped in value.
And really, who in their right mind would buy Meta? Do you want to be a patsy for Zuckerberg? Because unless they issue enough shares to bring his voting power under 50%, you're just along for the ride.
For all the ethical problems I have with Meta I am still on Facebook because my extended family is there and other people I interact with, like the musicians who I photograph at events, are there. Student groups are on Insta, etc.
(2) There is so much bad about Facebook. I see scam ads every day, particularly ads that reproduce UI elements from Facebook suggesting that you have notifications and then send you to some bizzaro world that is certainly some kind of fraud. I report these ads and get a nice note back about how they took action on them and two days later... the same ads appear. These idiots got it in writing [1] that they'd rather not filter the 10% of ads that are scam ads so they can make money ' https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
(3) I'm not a Christian, in fact I am something very different, but I'm tempted to say that Meta and other social media border on the satanic in terms of social influence. In particular I'd point to the way they draw a rift between men and women, for instance there are the endless thirst traps on Instagram and the come-ons for OnlyFans performers that never stop and on YouTube some of the easiest rabbit holes to get into are "Men suck", "Women suck", "Trans people suck", "Cis people suck", ... It makes some people rich at the expense of us all.
(4) It sounds like a lot of money by ordinary standards, but it is nowhere near enough to change their behavior.
[1] ... my conspirators in relatively innocent transgressions know better!
Meta is getting sued because they knew that their product caused harm to users, could detect which users were harmed, and chose to do nothing. It's a little bit like selling food to a customer that you know will give them food poisoning. It's very different from selling someone something that's slightly less healthy than their other options.
Ofc not all of these cases are so clear cut. There are big systemic problems with our food system and our mobility system that you seem to be aware of - but also if you notice Frito Lay is not getting sued by the justice department. Neither are car manufacturers writ large. There's actually a lot of writing and reflection on where the line is between "reasonable service" and "exploiting consumers".
"By failing to include industry-standard anti-theft technology in their vehicles, Hyundai and Kia unleashed a wave of auto thefts that cost Minnesotans their cars, their hard-earned money, and sometimes even their lives," Ellison wrote in a statement on Tuesday. "In short, they put their profits ahead of people’s safety."
As part of the settlement, Hyundai and Kia pledged to equip all future vehicles sold in the U.S. with industry-standard, engine immobilizer anti-theft technology, which prevents thieves from starting a vehicle’s engine without its “smart” key.
So, 1. Grand theft auto was already and still is a crime. 2. The car companies were being cheap and not adhering to industry-standard feature for basic anti-theft.
You should be thanking Keith Ellison for enforcing regulations that keep humans safe.
|https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/kia-and-hyundai-ag...
The real impact might not have been that big, I mean you get a few dollars a year discount from your car insurance for having an immobilizer, but people basically forgot that car theft was a problem and backed away from solutions in the 2010s, like I'd hear all these stories about telematic tricks to get cars started by making a fake key fob, relaying the signal from a key fob in your house, etc.
[1] I found out later that if you had "The Club" on your steering wheel that was advertised on The Rush Limbaugh Show somebody could use it as a lever to break your locking steering column!
The proverbial example is a landowner has a pool on their property. A child, maybe just one in the neighborhood, sees it and wants to go swimming, so they hop in. The child isn't a good enough swimmer to do so unassisted and drowns. The parents file a lawsuit. The landowner expects their insurance provider to help aid in the defense and any judgment made against them.
The insurance provider will then look at the pool. Was it surrounded by a fence? Did the fence have a locked gate? Was there any kind of alarm to indicate that someone was in the pool?
If the answer to any of those questions is "no" (particularly to the fence and gate parts) then the insurer might very well decline to cover the claim.
Why? Because it's not unreasonable, at least not to many people who sit on juries, to expect someone to have ways of keeping children out of pools due to the threat of drowning.
I'm not a lawyer, but you can sort of make that argument with the cars Hyundai was manufacturing. People on a jury might think it's not unreasonable to expect auto manufacturers to make their vehicles more difficult to steal, especially if doing so is common across the industry. It's the most expensive thing most people own and its theft can harm both the owner of the vehicle and the community they live in since stolen vehicles are often used in other crimes.
The person stealing the car is still liable, but if they're targeting your vehicles because you didn't want to put a relatively inexpensive part in the car to boost your profits on each vehicle sold, some people think you're liable too.
VC people are here, and it shows. They can't just be neutral, they have to downvote anything they disagree with or goes against their businesses
Before you become a parent, you think it's easy. You think you can just decide things for the kid, and that's the way it goes. Especially if you're a high flier, everything just seems like it works out if you put in a little effort.
The thing that's really frustrating is that this is also a lottery. Some kids will actually simply do the thing that you want, and generally choose things that are good for them. Like my first kid. If I only had one I would think it was simple, and that everyone can just raise a kid who can read books for adults before they're ten, or do calculus before tenth grade, or cook a full meal for himself. I mean, you just tell them what you think they should do, right?
But you can also have a kid that will not do what you want. You will get all the same well-meaning advice about making it fun for them, explaining your choices to them, and providing incentives. These advisors are at a loss when you do all the things they said, and yet the kid still won't eat their vegetables. They don't want to read, they don't want to try the sports you take them to, and they are having constant tantrums.
While you think you are simply doing what you did the first time around.
As the kids get older, it also becomes clear that you are not their only parent. And I don't mean your better half. They get an awful lot of impressions from the rest of society, which you are not in control of. If everyone has a phone, you then need to decide whether you want to just go with the flow, or your kid is going to be the one without. If their friends are on social media, you then have to decide what you think about that.
Parents have the busiest schedule of anyone in our society. If we're going to hold them responsible for their choices, the least we can do is provide them with some sensible defaults.
That does not happen all at one on the 18th birthday. It’s many years of gradually growing independence.
We'd take devices and lock them up, but in the middle of the night while we were asleep he'd find a way. He'd plan it out during the day. He'd borrow his friends' school Chromebook, hide it in his room, download videos for offline viewing, and then wake up at 1:00 AM and binge watch.
We set up security cameras and would punish him when we caught him, but it didn't matter, because all he wanted was to watch videos, and no punishment mattered. He was going to watch them anyway. We locked devices in a safe, and during the day he'd figure out how to pull up security video and get an idea of the combination, and try every one close to that until he got in.
We considered locking him in his room at night, but rejected it because of safety and bathroom issues. Eventually we had to set up alarms around the house that would wake us up every time he got up. It took years of our sleep and mental health suffering, but we eventually broke him of it. Or he grew out of it. Who knows.
Technology is ubiquitous today. The schools require it. Society demands it. It's like if every house had a heroin dispenser. How would you prevent a junkie from getting their fix?
We also blocked TikTok and lots of other stuff before they discovered it, thankfully.
We do allow Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV, and those seem to be okay. They'll watch a movie or a TV show from time to time, which is fine, and they'll get bored and do something else.
But YouTube... they are dead to the world. Forever. It's unbelievable.
The stuff they'd watch on YouTube too... it's like they gravitated straight to the dumbest most vapid thing on the platform. Stuff like the worst low-quality gamer livestream videos, AI slop, videos of people unboxing products, "jump scare" cut-up cartoons that make no sense. Found one of them once watching hours of a six hour long video of someone running over things with a truck: old laptops, old phones, toys. Crunch, repeat, crunch, repeat, with some kind of loud repeating banging music playing. That's all it was. Millions of views.
It's sad because there's a huge amount of great content on YouTube. But that's not what's addictive, and if you follow the recommendation algorithm it will send you to the trash every time. The only way to find good content is to ignore recommendations and search it.
Glad I banned TikTok before they discovered it. I know one parent who had to get that one away from their kid after the kid was already hooked and the kid was screaming, hunger striking, refusing to sleep, stuff similar to what you describe.
If you haven't seen it, you don't know.
I remember instances in my own childhood where my parents would e.g. turn off the wifi router when they were angry at me, and I'd instead figure out how to hack the neighbor's and use that. The dopamine hit from that was crazy, and I didn't even end up using it for much. It was more about showing them I could, and they had no control over me.
I suspect the things you described above might've contributed to the thrill of it. I find it hard to imagine downloading videos in advance being very similar to how the recommendations algorithm keeps you going (I imagine only longform videos would be practical). I can't know how "bad" the situation was, but installing cameras and alarms crosses several boundaries in trust and respect, that I can't imagine being good for a growing child, coming from their own parents...
At the end of the day, you can only help an addict that wants to be helped...
He wasn't very good at not getting caught. Half the time we caught him it was because he'd fall asleep watching videos and we'd find the laptop in his bed in the morning. Or some of the approaches just weren't very clever. At one point he took a computer from somewhere else in the house. He wasn't going to be able to put it back, so there was no way we wouldn't have found out.
This fit with his general problem-solving ability. He knew what he wanted, and he'd devise a way to get it, but he never thought things through after that. The consequences didn't matter; just like an addict looking for their next fix.
The addiction shifted a few times too. It wasn't always YouTube, but it was usually around technology (there was a short stint where it was about solving Rubik's Cubes, and maybe another around Lego).
It is your responsibility as a parent to raise and care for your kids, regardless of the law. It doesn't just have to do with social media or phone use, it applies to addictions, to behaviors, to their mental and physical makeup. We've had decades of unambiguous feedback that screens and especially social media are bad for kids. Yes its hard. Be the adult and do it! Consider google family link, screen time and app restrictions, taking away the phone for a time, or forever. Know that I and other parents will be cheering for you <3
I recommend reading "the anxious generation", lots of helpful grounded findings and data.
well, if you look at legal side, the OPPOSITE is assumed in many cases:
- age-limits on smoking cigar(rettes)/sex/drinking
- soft-limits on gambling
- hard-limits on drugs
Just 2.6% of profit or less than 0.8% of revenue. Seems like FB got the deal of the century since any judgement would have real restrictions and enforcement with teeth. Since this is just a consent decree, FB can now start the 'malicious compliance' game where they incrementally erode, reinterpret and route around any deal terms they don't like. The DA's position is now substantially weaker because they'll have to go back to court to stop FB's inevitable backsliding.
> I’d still want to know why they thought this was the moment to take the deal.
Ultimately, this is about politics and money. By taking a lousy deal the DAs got their headlines and payoff now and can claim a 'victory' before the next election cycle. The alternative is even after the DAs won this ruling, FB would certainly drag out the inevitable appeals because ~$200B tanks the stock, while 0.8% of rev is just a cost of business. By the time all appeals were done none of these DAs would even be in office. Neither the headlines nor cash would do them any good.
Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
It let them off the hook for a small fraction of the cost they would have incurred should the jury have come back with a verdict assigning liability to Meta, and Zuckerberg didn't have to take the stand.
In the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, "Wa-hoo, the system fails again!"