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Meta's legal team abandoned its ethical duties
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- ferguess_k 9mo agoI'd be happy if Meta's Legal Team withholds its legal duties. Asking them to be ethical is a huge /s.
- 0ckpuppet 9mo agoTrying not to be petulant, but I have some difficulty reading Meta and ethical in the same sentence.
- yardie 9mo agoTo all the parents: read Careless People. Realize everyone, including the author, is flaming hot trash. And never let your kids near social media ever again.
- candiddevmike 9mo agoAs a parent who doesn't let their kids on social media (and seems to be one of a handful of parent who use parental controls on phones), the FOMO is very real with the kids. They don't understand why I'm such a terrible person that won't let them have access to things their friends do. Friends will come over for sleepovers, and our kids will sit on YouTube for hours with their friends because we never let them on it and that's all their friends want to do. I don't know how to educate other parents to encourage more controls. Most are too busy to care it seems, the kids are content with their brain rot etc. I hate that these companies turn me into a villain with my kids because they produce hyper addictive crap without any constraints.
- boplicity 9mo agoHave you read the book? It would likely give you some good talking/discussion points...such as "FB intentionally let genocide happen. Do you think we should support them with our time?"
- pixl97 9mo ago[flagged]
- lukan 9mo ago"FB intentionally let genocide happen" What does not mean exactly?
- internet_points 9mo agomaybe talking about https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- boplicity 9mo agoIf you read Reckless People, it becomes quite clear how Facebook is culpable.
- yardie 9mo agoI go to friends' houses and the kids are watching the dumbest, most egregious things imagined on Youtube, constantly. When I ask if they go outside to play, they claim it's too hot, too cold, or too dangerous. They are attracted to these overdramatic influencers doing Jackass style stunts. And I find the entire experience grating.
- JoshTriplett 9mo agoHave you considered the possibility that others simply do not agree with you? There is a happy medium between "brain rot for hours" and "absolutely zero".
- drcongo 9mo agoI don't know why you're getting downvoted. At parents' evening one teacher told me I was literally the only parent of that school year that uses parental controls. Thankfully I don't have the FOMO part with my kids - they all seem to understand the reasoning and seem pretty fine with it - none of them have ever asked for TikTok for instance. We recently went to a family gathering though and I was genuinely shocked to see one toddler, barely able to speak, left alone with TikTok on a phone, just swiping away for hours.
- boplicity 9mo agoThe book was absolutely horrifying. Meta is far worse than most people realize.
- lostlogin 9mo agoSpoilers please! Are they doing worse than their genocide phase?
- marstall 9mo agoThe Myanmar story was definitely the worst (Mark Z + callow execs being willfully ignorant as Facebook clearly inflamed ethnic cleansing there and caused many deaths). Later in the book, the China story was a close second. In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent. Tons of other weird/bad/embarrassing stuff too. The author, a member of the core executive team, was seriously complicit but redeemed herself in my view with this no-holds-barred account of the complete lack of ethics up top. In general a damning portrait of the executive team as just not giving a shit about anything except for growth and willing to actively participate in dictatorship in order to make it happen.
- Anon1096 9mo ago> In order to get into China (to "grow") - exec team agreed to host Facebook's servers in China where the government could get access to customer private data, so they could stifle dissent. That's exactly what Apple does with iCloud in China.
- boplicity 9mo agoIt wasn't just Chinese data, though. It was access to all customer data. They also built tools specifically for searching and filtering that data that they told congress were impossible to build...
- alex1138 9mo ago
- wrqvrwvq 9mo agoThere's a lot of indignant people who seem to expect or insist that meta should act according to their own incoherent set of ethical frameworks or half-baked "morality", imagining that their poorly conceived, narrowly defined and inconsistently applied morals are universal constants that must be operant for all. But somehow none of them has considered that fb is not a public good and they can just opt out. fb has always been a garbage heap for rubes, not sure why people need it to conform to their downmarket ethical delusions.
- testing22321 9mo agoIt’s quite obvious that making money has trumped ethics in US companies for a long time now. Look what united healthcare does to its “customers” to make more money.[1] Every last one of them should be rotting in jail, but that ain’t good for the ol GDP which is more important that peoples lives. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-to-cut-costs-just-let-the-elderly-die/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/unitedhealths-alleged-plan-t...
- lostlogin 9mo ago> Every last one of them should be rotting in jail Even if it happened, they’d get pardoned.
- emilsedgh 9mo agoIf it was about GDP it'd have "some" moral defense: That this leads to overall wealth growth of the population. But it's not about GDP. It's about shareholder value which is absolutely not representative of the whole population. Extreme greed is now part of US social contract, top to bottom, and has driven the whole society to madness sadly.
- 9mo ago
- jfengel 9mo agoWhen lawyers abandon fact, evidence, and law, and turn their craft toward suppression instead, they corrode the foundation of public trust on which the entire legal system depends. That is a ship that sailed a long, long, long time ago.
- bflesch 9mo agoUnchecked white-collar crime by US tech companies poisoning the world.
- glitchc 9mo agoWhen it comes to voluntary consumption or use, I always vote for freedom over restriction or censorship. Let people eat all the fried chicken they want if that is what they want to do with their hard-earned dollars.
- aprdm 9mo agoExcept there's been way too much investment to trick the human brain into that consumption, so it is not a fair fight - that's true both for food and for tech. There are countless documentaries, books and articles on this. You're bringing a knife to a gunfight
- pepperball 9mo ago> You're bringing a knife to a gunfight It’s worse than that, it’s like bringing a knife to a fight against an entire army equipped with all the latest and greatest weapons of the day.
- glitchc 9mo agoYou are free to sue Meta. If you can demonstrate harm, you will win. They may pay you off handsomely to avoid seeing the case go to trial. It's because we are free that the option exists. Is that not better than letting government decide which companies you can and cannot sue?
- lenerdenator 9mo agoAs the popular practice shows, the first and only duty of a for-profit company is to create returns for shareholders. If you do that ethically, fine. If you're not sure if it's ethical, try anyways. If it's unethical, do it. If it's illegal, do the cost-benefit analysis of what the punishment would cost the shareholders. That's how these people think, and it's a direct threat to the liberty and well-being of our society. EDIT: Downvote me all you want, but look around. That's how many of the people at the top of companies think as evidenced by their companies' behavior.
- SoftTalker 9mo agoOur Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other. (John Adams)
- lenerdenator 9mo agoWe, for better or worse, got rid of those things. People can downvote my original comment all they want, but understand, that is the mindset of people like Mark Zuckerberg. Make money any way possible.
- advisedwang 9mo ago> the first and only duty of a for-profit company is to create returns for shareholders That's a choice, not a law of nature. We can make law that changes that. Individual executives can push back. Society at large can change norms and expectations. Why would we choose the nightmare world where profit must come first? The only reason you hear this argument deployed seriously is when the person saying it has their own motivations for wanting profit to be supreme.
- lenerdenator 9mo agoI'm not saying it's right, I'm saying "this is how the people in charge think".
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- bradlys 9mo ago[flagged]
- JohnFen 9mo ago> I find anything written where typical employees are held accountable for the actions of what are definitely top level decisions to be deplorable. If you're working for a company that you know is behaving unethically, you are complicit in that behavior.
- bradlys 9mo agoInherently all companies working under capitalism are behaving unethically. There is no ethical consumption or production in capitalism. What’s your point?
- ChrisArchitect 9mo agoRelated previously: Meta buried 'causal' evidence of social media harm, US court filings allege https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817
- bigmeme 9mo ago[flagged]
- samtp 9mo agoPosting AI summaries of articles that you didn't even read is one of the worst type of comments you can possibly make.
- charcircuit 9mo agoThis article seems to argue: - Attorney client privilege is unethical. - Reducing your legal risk by deleting old data that is no longer needed and no longer on legal hold is unethical. - Violating laws that say you can't collect data on children is okay to do. I personally don't see these as bad things. Lawyers will trying and minimize the risk the company is in for violating various laws that exist around the world. I think it is ethical for them to give such advice. I also think attorney client privilege is also a big part of being ethical and saying that it is unethical is just trying to manipulate people's values to the author's benefit.
- stonogo 9mo agoThis is a breathtakingly disingenuous summary of the article. I cannot imagine a perspective sufficiently warped to produce this interpretation a priori.
- CPLX 9mo agoAgreed. It’s easy to imagine billions of reasons why people will people will defend indefensible behavior by companies with billions of dollars though.
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo agoI personally don't see these as bad things. With the dose of bad faith you put on those arguments, it sounds like you would fit right in with the described Meta lawyers. I'm not sure it's even worth engaging with you considering how you engaged with the content by ignoring the preface about John Adams and the ethics of practicing law.
- bigmeme 9mo ago[flagged]
- charcircuit 9mo ago>ignoring the preface about John Adams I don't think it was a useful example since what is happening with Meta is different. It's not like a British soldier admitted to Adams that he murdered someone and Adams shared that fact in court.
- hedayet 9mo agoEx-facebook employee here: abandoning ethics in facebook didn't start in near past. And it's not only the legal team; engineers and PM team are even worse in this matter. Only people ready to do "anything" to optimize their performance rating and team goal are successful at facebook. And remember, facebook only hires smart people. So they do know what they are doing.
- 10xDev 9mo ago>facebook only hires smart people So it is true, they really do only hire insufferable pricks.
- kevin061 9mo ago"they know what they are doing". Individually? Maybe! I hear Meta pays among the highest, if not the single highest salaries of FAANG. But as a company? Meta has been entirely incapable to innovate since it was renamed. Betting billions on an obviously flawed idea of a Facebook-owned VR universe, then shortly pivoting to a cryptocurrency that ended up being little more than a rugpull, and, after investing billions in expensive AI staff, they're now pulling the plug on that, too The most successful products like WhatsApp and Instagram were purchased, not internal developments. Nobody cares about Threads and it mostly only exists because Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I sure hope Instagram and WhatsApp are bringing in enough money because Meta is running out of things to do, other than milking their current customers dry. Do they know what they're doing? Do they really?
- refulgentis 9mo agoIt comes across as boorish, on an article about widespread sexual exploitation including children and 17-strike sex trafficking policies, to write a long rant about whether the trillion dollar company has a long-term business strategy that'll give it more power. That is quite clearly not what they are asserting, discussing, or even adjacent to conversationally. It doesn't help when you're exaggerating to make it have some foundation, and obviously so. (they pivoted from VR to crypto? pulled the plug on AI?)
- wrxd 9mo ago
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoSince reading too much philosophy (username relevant), I don't think ethics are worth teaching. Instead, put laws in place that benefit the state/population(I know these can conflict, but at least in a republic, there are power sharing agreements that can balance these). At best, you can indoctrinate people with a religion, conventional religion or a modern ascetic stoic humanist religion. But its silly to think that religion is going to stop 100% of the population from doing anti-social things. This might be strange to hear, but people have different and conflicting values. The worker at Meta might have a life goal to help society, the executive might have a life goal of making lots of money. These conflict, and its overly optimistic to rely on individual ethics to create a good world to live in. Now I'll give an example: Should affairs be punished? Currently, there are plenty of US states that don't have laws on this. However, there may be something to be said about having a contractual agreement that penalizes this. If there is no contract, then it doesn't matter. We can enforce pro-social values, we don't need to rely on individuals being wholly good.
- kevin061 9mo agoAre you faniliar with the concept of the "Andon cord"? You might be interested in reading this post: https://ulveon.net/p/2025-06-20-the-andon-cord-mechanisms-and-good-intentions/ https://ulveon.net/p/2025-06-20-the-andon-cord-mechanisms-an...
- jmward01 9mo agoI personally don't want companies deciding what is or isn't ethical. That is because a company only has one ethos, make money, so a company's ethics and mine will never line up. I expect every company to be rational which means they will be evil from my point of view. Any system that relies on companies to 'do the right thing' on behalf of people is clearly broken and any push to get them to 'do the right thing' when they don't have to is foolish. This is why we have laws and other checks in the system like journalism. From the article it looks like there is a clear argument that these lawyers broke the law in destroying evidence or purposefully hiding it/. The real issue here is that they, and their clients, aren't being held accountable for it. That is the issue that needs to be vigorously pursued. Why are they protected over people? Dig into that and we may actually make headway on the problem.
- ultrarunner 9mo agoIf I'm understanding correctly, you seem to propose that companies of people (generally, executives) should not be responsible for ethics, but rather politicians checked by journalists. Politicians are notorious for their lack of ethics. Journalists have acquiesced to reprinting police reports and political press releases. Assuming someone unfortunately attains legal standing, the court process is so expensive and tedious it remains unaccessible anyway. This is to say nothing of political corruption or the way criminal proceedings work for people like Meta executives versus the general public. How do you reconcile this dissonance?
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo agoI read it as "companies should not be the definition of what is ethical behavior", not your reading of "they should not be responsible for ethics".
- jmward01 9mo agoI didn't say that politicians and laws are perfect. They are terrible. But the key differences is that I have at least -some- say in politicians while I have 0 say in a company. This is why libertarian philosophy always breaks down for me 'let the free market decide/do whatever' just leads to companies being the de-facto government and individuals having no say. I'll take a flawed system that has some redeeming qualities over a broken system with no redeeming qualities any day.
- tylerchilds 9mo agoIt’s articles like these that make me believe if Mark had not dropped out of Harvard, he could have become world class. Alas.
- cwoolfe 9mo agoif only he had stayed long enough to take PHIL S-18 -- Human Ethics: An Introduction to Moral Philosophy
- alex1138 9mo agoDoes that course cover "It's not a good idea to forcibly add gay people to groups and then publically post it to their timeline, outing them"? Or perhaps the photo tags that get added of them (sometimes automatically) at the gay club (I use the second one as an example, without reference to anything specific, but the first one really did happen. Jason Calacanis talks about it in his interview on Lex Fridman)
- alex1138 9mo agoIsn't Mark 'dropping out' potentially buying the lede? He was in hot water for Facemash and almost expelled. Maybe his hand was forced?
- tylerchilds 9mo agoYeah, I like this take. He was in hot water and got adopted by the other techno super villains that brought us to this timeline.
- raincole 9mo agoI think the whole idea of holding a platform responsible for what users do is extremely unethical. Especially in this case, it's not even Meta's platform. It's Roblox. Meta's providing the hardware and app store here. If the laws make Meta somehow possibly responsible for child abuse happening on Roblox, and the legal team protects them from this, I think the legal team is on the ethical side. > Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable Wow. Just wow.
- AlexandrB 9mo ago> Sattizahn also testified how, after his research on Meta’s VR platform uncovered children under the age of 10 in Germany being propositioned for “sex acts, nude photos, and other acts that no child should ever be exposed to,” Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” The permissiveness by the company that Savage and Sattizahn testified to is mirrored by the more recently unsealed court documents, which included that Meta maintained a 17-strike policy for sex trafficking accounts — removing predators only after they were caught attempting to traffic people 17 separate times. Meta’s own internal documents called this threshold “very, very, very high.” > On October 23, 2025, a judge in a separate case validated what the whistleblowers and court documents had described. Invoking the rarely used crime-fraud exception to pierce Meta’s attorney-client privilege, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Yvonne Williams found Meta’s lawyers had coached researchers to hide, block, and sanitize studies on teen mental-health harm in order to shield the company from liability. Judge Williams determined there was probable cause that these communications were “fundamentally inconsistent with the basic premises of the adversary system.” [emphasis mine] Yes, the lawyers are totally in the clear here.
- pepperball 9mo ago> Meta’s in-house lawyers demanded the erasure of any and all evidence of this finding. When asked by Senator Josh Hawley how often she’d witnessed an underage user being exposed to inappropriate sexual content on Meta VR, Savage replied, “every time I use the headset.” We need brutal, public executions for people like this.
- AznHisoka 9mo agoI funny it amusing/sad that this story was written by a substack author, and not a major news publication
- jacquesm 9mo agoTo the surprise of absolutely nobody. Meta's main shareholder is devoid of any intrinsic ethics, it should come as absolutely no surprise that their legal team has abandoned their ethical duties because I would have assumed they never had any in the first place. Zuckerberg's only saving grace by now is that he's not the only despicable billionaire.
- RajT88 9mo agoRelated headline: Water wet
- _jab 9mo agoI'm pretty tempted to discredit this article on the basis of the author's lack of legal expertise, but to be honest I don't really have the expertise to properly comment here either. But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously. Also, I don't think their depiction of John Adams's representation of the British soldiers is accurate. From what I can tell, Adams sought only to give his clients as strong a legal defense as possible. In the trial, he called the American protestors a "mob", gave a racist depiction of one of the victims to justify the soldiers' panic, and ultimately saw all but two soldiers acquitted. Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter.
- nathanyz 9mo agoSo, one of the things I have personally seen is where these companies have in-house counsel and then CC that person on emails that could be problematic if they were ever required to be produced in discovery. Then if something does happen, it is easy to claim privilege on these emails and hide what are essentially non-legal related emails from lawsuits. There is flimsy cover of keeping counsel informed so they can provide legal guidance if needed, but that essentially undermines the legal process during a lawsuit as the very emails verifying a plaintiff's claim may be in these privileged emails, or maybe not, but without seeing them only the company and their legal teams knows. Yes, this is unethical and also can lead to things like we see in this case where the judge will pierce privilege because it was being abused. But......unless you can prove that is what is going on in the emails, judges are very reticent to pierce privilege.
- freejazz 9mo ago>But I don't think the author is correctly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, and their repeated questioning of attorney-client privilege, which I've considered to be one of the foundations of the American legal system, is hard to take seriously. Any particular reason why you think the author is incorrectly interpreting the principles of legal ethics, including attorney-client privilege? >Adams viewed this as a patriotic act, yes, but only insofar as he believed all accused of crimes in America deserved fair legal representation. He was a lawyer defending his clients, not the judge or jury trying to find the "truth" of the matter. I think you misunderstood the point, which was that if Adams had knowledge that the british soldier did have such an intent, he'd be violating his ethical obligations by withholding that information on the principal of attorney-client privilege.
- shevy-java 9mo ago> without an independent and impartial bar willing to defend the despised Well - capitalism nullified that. You need money - and connections - to win for many cases in court. So it is more of a milking game than "the old ideals". > today’s legal ethics codes still speak of lawyers’ threefold duty: to the client, to the court, and to the country This creates a conflict of interest. If the lawyer thinks he is not responsible for winning the case, then a defendent should be able to defend himself or herself in court. Though this leads to an automatic loss, let's be honest. The current system is designed to make the courts and lawyers rich(er). > Imagine if Adams had decided that defending his clients meant winning at all costs. So why should this matter for the client? Why would Adams be allowed to be lazy and lose? How is that a winning strategy for the client? > Meta lawyers ordering evidence of child exploitation destroyed Well - people made Facebook rich. That was a big mistake on their behalf. Now children suffer - perhaps you should not have made Facebook rich in the first place. > These lawyers collapsed Adams’ threefold duty into one — serve the client alone, whatever the cost to the courts and the country. I think Facebook should be disbanded, but I fail to see why the lawyers should consider "courts and the country". That makes no sense. Then again I also don't think corporations should have persona-rights either - the whole system is not fair. > Meta’s attorneys have forgotten that the law’s legitimacy derives from the integrity of those who practice it. Except that the rich have always gamified the system. Look at Trump. The whole focus on Facebook here makes no sense. This is a systematic problem. Question the whole system. It is basically legal corruption. > Holding Meta accountable includes holding its lawyers accountable They know they work for evil but they get money that way. So the question is: why does evil pay so much money? The whole system is geared towards that. > The truth will out for Meta’s lawyers — eventually — as happened with Big Tobacco’s I am not sure this can be compared 1:1. Tobacco lied about cancer and smoking. I don't think Meta faces the same problem, even if they ruin people's life. The data just isn't as clear as for smoking. The whole article is really weak. I'd be the first to chop down Facebook, Google etc... and split these up for evil, but you need to write good articles as to why. That article seems superweak. The comparison to Big Tobacco simply don't apply 1:1. And being an evil lawyer in itself does not invalidate a case, even if their rationale for throwing out cases is also garbage.
- Havoc 9mo agoLegal teams tend to be the most "pragmatic" crowd in companies in my experience.
- causalscience 9mo agoLawyers are intellectual prostitutes. Think about it. They will defend whatever position you pay them to defend. Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". In any other profession this would be corruption, but when it comes to lawyers that's their job. Intellectual prostitutes.
- hydrogen7800 9mo agoI have no education in law, and know next to nothing of its practice, but I do know that a lawyer's role is not necessarily to believe their client's innocence, but to make sure the system in which they are operating is adhering to the law even if the expected outcome is a guilty verdict.
- causalscience 9mo agoNo no those are lawyers for poor people like you and me. When we talk about lawyers for companies and billionaires it's a completely different game. Remember last time a lawyer said they wouldn't represent facebook because they didn't necessarily believe their innocence? Right, never happened. Because on that league, the game is to twist the meaning of words so much that the judge starts to doubt he understands the law himself.
- coppsilgold 9mo ago> Can you imagine if you ask an engineer "what's your opinion on the maximum load this bridge can take?" he answered "for a fee, I will claim that my opinion is what you tell me". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_witness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expert_witness
- causalscience 9mo ago> An expert witness, particularly in common law countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States, is a person whose opinion by virtue of education, training, certification, skills or experience, is accepted by the judge as an expert. The judge may consider the witness's specialized (scientific, technical or other) opinion about evidence or about facts before the court within the expert's area of expertise, to be referred to as an "expert opinion". Thanks for reinforcing my point.
- AlexandrB 9mo ago"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg I'm sure folks will come out of the woodwork to say that this isn't relevant as it was 20 years ago and Zuckerberg was just a wee lad at the time. However, I've never seen any evidence that Meta's attitude towards its users has changed since this quote was written. Every new Meta scandal just helps keep this thing relevant for another year or two.
- alex1138 9mo agoCorrect. The hostile takeover of Whatsapp, snooping on Snapchat after copying their features 100 times into 1000 of their products. And so much else
- testing-grounds 9mo ago[flagged]
- overgard 9mo agoFWIW, "Careless People" is an excellent read.
- alex1138 9mo agoIn which the CEO of the single largest social media company, who's responsible (and whose algorithms are responsible) for the mediation of human interactions across the entire planet, really dislikes losing board games so his staff is instructed to let him win No. Seriously.
- unyttigfjelltol 9mo agoOne might engage this topic better by asking a series of rhetorical questions. 1. Imagine you drove 40mph in a 25mph zone, a school zone. Children were present. Do you present yourself to the police? 2. You consult an attorney. Should the attorney report your conduct to the police independently? 3. You write a root cause analysis in an effort to verify your perception of exceeding the speed limit and endangering children. Then you lose interest. Are you prohibited from deleting it? 4. You give the analysis to the attorney. Must they permanently preserve it until one of the children you endangered sues you? Attorney-client privilege is always thin with in-house counsel, and it’s a high-stakes, hard-decisions situation both defending and challenging in all cases. The mention of crime-fraud suggests my hypothetical is a tamer than the actual facts considered by the judge, and this may be the real lesson: 5. How do you distinguish between speeding in a school zone and something that requires a fundamentally different response, even one contrary to your client’s goals?
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo agoAsk yourself a question, should we protect a trillion dollar company from perpetuating child abuse by trivializing their harm and compare it to speeding? btw, school zones are 20mph or less. It's telling in this analogy that you don't seem to have children of your own?
- unyttigfjelltol 9mo ago> you don't seem to have children of your own? No, your intuition is incorrect. I often think of the random carnage inflicted by automobiles on bystanders as a model for societal inconsistency, which perhaps was the reason it came to mind for the hypothetical. Tire tracks across the sidewalk, marks on the post, just another risk wanly accepted by society. Anyway, for a more extreme hypothetical, all you have to do is make the speed more egregious. One answer at 40mph; how high until the attorney walks you to the police station? 250mph? Habitual?
- b40d-48b2-979e 9mo agoIt's systematic is the problem. People have been trained by the auto/oil companies over fifty-plus-years to accept the unacceptable, that somehow the automobile is the only way to be "free" and be transported. I don't think there's any speed in which an attorney turns you in for the crime of reckless operation since we (society) don't see the risk of harm that didn't lead to realized harm. If you injured or killed someone, you get turned in, but obviously that's too late. I live on a 25mph street, I often see people traveling at double that speed and there are pedestrians nearly all the time. I've complained to the police only to be told that "it's infrequent so we can't catch them" despite this being a daily experience. I wish we lived in a different reality where these risks weren't so acceptable to the society.
- josefritzishere 9mo agoNormally at a major corp, the attorneys act as a buffer to stop management from doing crime. Once the legal team becomes co-opted that's the HOV lane to the SEC.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 9mo ago"The latest revelations about Meta's malfeasance come from newly unsealed court documents. In 2020, the company discovered through its own experimental research - an initiative known as Project Mercury - that when users reduced the amount of time they spent on Facebook, their levels of depression, anxiety, and loneliness decreased. Meta's lawyers buried the findings." Further reading: https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.401490/gov.uscourts.cand.401490.2480.0.pdf https://dn710108.ca.archive.org/0/items/gov.uscourts.cand.40... Excerpts: "And we start with what is perhaps the most succinct acknowledgment of the problem, from a chat between two UX Researchers: "oh my gosh yall IG is a drug... We're basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can't feel reward anymore... like their reward tolerance is so high... I know Adam [Mosseri] doesn't want to hear it he freaked out when I talked about dopamine in my teen fundamentals leads review but its undeniable! Its biological and psychological... the top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more. That would be fine if its productive but most of the time it isn't... the majority is just mindless scrolling and ads." Ex. 74 at 2152-53." "One Meta employee warned, "if the results are bad and we don't publish and they leak, is it going to look like tobacco companies doing research and knowing cigs were bad and then keeping that info to themselves? I went... oh." Ex. 91 at 1943."
- tsoukase 9mo agoThe title poses it like companies (such as Meta) should be ethical and they might sometime stop to be. No for-profit company is obliged to be ethical, only legal. So the surprising news here are 'Meta used to be ethical until recently'
- zombot 9mo agoWhat ethical duties? Their job is to safeguard the money printing machine and to isolate it from all externalized costs and consequences. Those people would sell their children into slavery if it made them a nickel.
- zombot 9mo agoThat's why they work at Meta. Where else can you make comparable boatloads of money from the misery of children?