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Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
- Havoc 3mo agoHe could just swing by the whitehouse with a donation to make this go away. That seems to be the way now
- daveidol 3mo agoHasn’t that always been the way? A little Super PAC and some lobbying to grease the wheels
- the_real_cher 3mo agoI feel like everyone implicitly knows the algorithm is designed to be addictive. Its like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that. Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.
- mapleoin 3mo ago> Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits. So does smoking, depending on who you listen to: relaxation, pleasure, socialising, "feeling free" etc. But this is just to emphasise your point that we change our thinking as a society on the importance of both harms and benefits.
- SirMaster 3mo agoI don't know how you can compare it to smoking. There is no way to have a healthy relationship with smoking. It's always damaging your lungs and such no matter what the positives are. A person can absolutely have a perfectly healthy relationship with social media where there are 0 negative effects and only positive effects.
- iAMkenough 3mo agoAlcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.
- cwmoore 3mo agoSee the 18th and 21st Amendments to the US Constitution.
- iAMkenough 3mo agoYes, the 21st Amendment is democratic society accepting the negatives despite the limited positives.
- cwmoore 3mo agoI was musing earlier today that in US culture you must have a liquor license to sell alcohol, but a drivers license to purchase it.
- topgrain2 3mo agoI’m pretty sure all the benefits of social media exist in aspects other than the engagement-driven “algo” feed.
- HappySweeney 3mo agothis site has some popup that hijacks the page and tries to trick you into installing an antivirus with fake infection reports. Closing that popup sends you to walmart.com
- matterhorn2000 3mo agoQuestion is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.
- rafterydj 3mo agoIf you know it, and I know it, and everybody knows it, why the hell are we paying huge amounts to mince words over the proof?
- andsoitis 3mo agoAre you saying everyone knows it was designed to be addictive and thus no proof that it was is needed PLUS people actually got addicted to it (similar to drugs)? If so, what is your definition of addictive because it seems to differ from mine.
- solumunus 3mo agoBecause that is how the law operates.
- ozgrakkurt 3mo agoThis is more of a learning question. I recommend reading why law exists in the first place
- stronglikedan 3mo agobecause sometimes what everyone thinks they know is wrong, and law is extremely nuanced, so everyone deserves a chance to defend themselves
- rg2004 3mo agoFeels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.
- amelius 3mo ago... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.
- villish 3mo agoI have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
- api 3mo agoAll of it is addiction engineered.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoOne lawsuit existing isn’t mutually exclusive to another one being filed, of course.
- Gualdrapo 3mo agoAs far as I know neither Tiktok or YT have contributed to a genocide[0] or sold their user's data for political propaganda purposes[1], so at least there's that [0] https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
- nashashmi 3mo agoTiktok US is now participating in suppressing genocide news. Facebook doesn’t allow to follow Palestine interests
- ceejayoz 3mo agoThey're all doing it, and they all need consequences for it. Per the article: > Meta is one of several social media companies facing mounting legal pressure. Snap, Alphabet-owned YouTube and ByteDance-owned TikTok are also battling thousands of lawsuits alleging they intentionally designed their platforms to keep children and teenagers hooked, contributing to widespread mental health problems. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299 https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/tiktok-reaches-settle... > The 15-year-old boy, identified in court filings by his initials, R.K.C., accuses Meta (the parent of Instagram), YouTube, TikTok and Snap of designing their platforms to be addictive through features such as infinite scroll and autoplay.
- josefritzishere 3mo agoTBH, I think this should be prosecuted as a felony. In the past, fines have not proven to motivate Meta to change.
- notyourwork 3mo agoSeems like we all forgot about the election scandal with Meta. They are a parasite to society and what used to be a way to connect with college peers has become a stain to adolescent development.
- nradov 3mo agoWhich criminal law did Meta or its employees allegedly violate? Please to give a specific citation. I'm not endorsing their actions but criminal charges can't be based on vibes.
- kridsdale1 3mo ago“Harm” to be found is the job of the trial.
- cwmoore 3mo agoI don’t think harm is a legal standard.
- specialist 3mo agoAs you know, law lags behind. Even when defendants are found not guilty, these cases are (apparently) necessary precedent for future remedies. Not least of which is creating social stigma. I'm thinking of how organized crime ('60s - '80s) were untouchable, and how prosecutors learned how to use then new RICO laws to bring (some) of them down.
- ceejayoz 3mo agohttps://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-9/chapter-2/section-273a/ https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/titl... > Any person who, under circumstances or conditions likely to produce great bodily harm or death, willfully causes or permits any child to suffer, or inflicts thereon unjustifiable physical pain or mental suffering... shall be punished by imprisonment in a county jail not exceeding one year, or in the state prison for two, four, or six years.
- davedx 3mo agoSome useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Meta-suit-summary.pdf https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024... "Meta knew what it was doing" In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.” Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of 208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact, Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including: • Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72 • Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894 • By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….” That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.” One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.” As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.” In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”
- notyourwork 3mo agoScary and utter chilling to read. Reminds me of the Firestone scandal in some ways but likely with far reaching worse consequences for society.
- kingleopold 3mo ago
- Grombobulous 3mo agoI wonder if there’s a Betterridge’s Law of Headlines but for “could.” I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement. The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.
- 55555 3mo ago$423 billion*
- zerobees 3mo agoMeta revenues are significantly higher than the revenues of tobacco companies. Plus, the tobacco settlement was breaking new ground; here "you did this even though you knew what happened to tobacco companies" works to Meta's disadvantage. On the flip side, what works to their advantage is that it's harder to put a dollar amount on the health burdens that Meta creates. By the time of the tobacco settlement, there was pretty robust evidence of the number of cancers and other disease caused by tobacco, and the lawsuits were supposed to recover healthcare costs.
- Grombobulous 3mo agoYeah, on the flip side though, Meta’s product doesn’t directly kill you or cause cancer. From a cost recovery standpoint I’m not sure what they can go after.
- imglorp 3mo agoMeta is a symptom; the whole business is rotten. We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
- dan_i 3mo ago[dead]
- rf15 3mo agoWhat HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.
- imglorp 3mo agoSort of - it's collective wrongdoing. Individuals on the street do not do this to each other. Individuals in groups justify their tiny contribution as insignificant towards the aggregate societal harm the organism does. Leaders like Zuck, on the other hand, have no excuse. And marketers, there's still time to save your souls and find honest work.
- intended 3mo agoYes and no. At the scale of these firms, it is an issue of incentives, more than it is personal responsibility. I know that many of the people who worked in safety flagged issues. I know NGOs and victims reached out to people in the firm over and over again. Humans wanted to do the right thing. Its just that for other humans, they had to answer to shareholders and they had a far stronger set of incentives to ensure they made “number go up”. Your string of people doing the right thing, makes little headway in the face of the tide of other humans who have incentives to increase time on site.
- baggachipz 3mo ago> Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds. Neither are most adults. The current situation in the world is plenty of evidence for that.
- gmerc 3mo agoCorporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
- brk 3mo agoWhile that is certainly a topic worth pursuing, especially for anyone with a "corporations are people" argument, the challenge is the immediate vacuum afterwards, which is likely to attract copy-cats. You might "execute" a corporation for proven anti-human actions, but that takes time. New corporations can crop up, maybe even involving some of the same prior executives, and the cycle starts again.
- tremon 3mo agoThat's why the punishment should also have a sufficient deterrent effect. If the punishment can't sufficiently deter the behaviour, it should at least deter the capital enabling that behaviour at scale. In other words: void the stock.
- bigwheels 3mo agoAre you going to take away all of Zuckerberg's vast personal fortune, and all the other execs at Meta? What about all the folks who've wokred as engineer and product managers? Otherwise they're still making out like bandits.
- ryandrake 3mo ago$0'ing the shares would probably spread the punishment roughly proportionally with the harms they did. It's not a perfect solution (people who previously sold their equity would be missed), but better than most.
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- sscaryterry 3mo agoCouldn't happen to a nicer person.
- giwook 3mo agoUnfortunately, I think we all know how this story ends. The company will settle for a slap on the wrist, a paltry fine that is but a fraction of the profit that was made as a result of the infraction. The company will not admit to any wrongdoing as a result of the settlement. The company will continue their behavior but in a stealthier, more obfuscated fashion.
- intended 3mo agoThis does not need to be the case though. After so many years, the question on the societal utility of meta and similar services is finally being forced. No matter what the verdict, the design and limits which make effective policy is still to be negotiated and figured out.
- NickC25 3mo agoYou're forgetting some things which are quite sad and reflective of our society: The CEO will not be personally affected at all. He'll still have hundreds of billions in the bank. The CEO will be paraded in front of congress who will then proceed to ask him softball questions carefully prepared by a team of lobbyists and Meta lawyers. The CEO will answer like a robot. Senators and congressmen will not push back on the CEO's answers even though everyone in the room knows said answers are deliberate obfuscation and dishonest wordsmithing at best. The CEO will be praised by the Senate Minority Leader simply because the CEO is from the Senator's district. The same Senator will highlight all the good work the CEO does to help the Israeli military. (this is not antisemitism, for the record. Senate Minority Leader Schumer has constantly said his main job is to protect Israel's interests). The company's shares will increase, and everyone will praise the company and its CEO. Every major podcast, even those run by centrists and capitalist leftists, will praise the CEO's ability as someone who is incredible at delivering amazing returns. Shareholders will allow the company to operate as normal, because they are making money. The cycle repeats itself.
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- _fat_santa 3mo agoI see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal. Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
- dboreham 3mo agoI think you could ignore their legal argument in the civilized world but in the USA perhaps not. The very concept of a "formally recognized diagnosis" is American health insurance industry gaslighting (also not a formal diagnosis fwiw). It means nothing in other countries.
- bluefirebrand 3mo ago> Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making You can't ignore their argument it but it doesn't hold water imo They knew they were causing harm, whether that harm is labelled "social media addiction" as a medically recognized term or something else is immaterial
- 999900000999 3mo agoI actually like Instagram, primarily for the ads. Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them. Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase. I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram. Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.
- johng 3mo agoI've purchased so many things off Instagram in the past couple of years. I'm building a new house and half of it is going to be filled with Instagram advertised stuff. It just seemed so accurate for the stuff I needed. (my kitchen sink, master shower set, furniture, etc.)
- Synthetic7346 3mo agoHow do you trust advertisements? Do you do your own research after?
- inigyou 3mo agoDoesn't that creep you out?
- sebastiennight 3mo ago"I actually like the camel's design on the cigarette pack" is a surprising take in this thread, but I guess no product can get to billions of users without having many really happy users.
- 999900000999 3mo agoHow do you find your niche VSTs ? They don’t exactly advertise them on the evening news. I’m too lazy to make it, but now I want a short form video platform that’s 100% ads. Nothing else. Call it HonestSales.
- jmyeet 3mo agoI firmly believe that we could solve a whole bunch of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to and target minors in online advertising on social media platforms. Remove the incentive and you'll get a lot better behavior. The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated). You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.
- 0x59 3mo agoMeta helps gov w surveillance, so they won't be hit w a $1.4T damage. I imagine a few mil could come out of this tho.
- inigyou 3mo agoFacebook was originally an NSA project called Lifelog but the NSA couldn't figure out how to make people sign up
- alex1138 3mo agoWhich is kind of odd Would they have done that to the Winklevosses' ConnectU? Was ConnectU purely a 'dating site'? As far as I know it was them who onboarded it using college connections
- eli 3mo agoThese types of lawsuits seem dangerous. But Meta is a pretty awful company and deserves some sort of comeuppance. I worry about what it leads to though. Hard cases make bad laws.
- intended 3mo agoThey are difficult lawsuits for sure! But that is because the status quo is already messed up. These cases are going to bring up questions on content moderation, engagement, ad revenue, age verification, and a whole host of insane things that people don’t want to think about.
- eli 3mo agoI think a better way to regulate content moderation would be to pass laws that regulate content moderation. Not backdoor regulations through very broad interpretations of product liability. HN surely has some underage users. If they look at their analytics and tweak the interface to improve time on site, are they also intentionally creating a product that is addictive to children?
- intended 3mo agoI think your question needed to be discussed 10 years ago. I don’t know the answer to your example, but I would very much like to know what the canonical answer is, and what the pros and cons are. It’s not a topic that gets as much attention, even here on HN.
- blaqq2 3mo agoI wonder exactly where everything kind of went south for Mark and his platform, or was this always the goal since Facebook's inception
- AlexandrB 3mo agoIt went south around this point: Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard Zuck: Just ask. Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS [Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one? Zuck: People just submitted it. Zuck: I don't know why. Zuck: They "trust me" Zuck: Dumb fucks. I don't know why anyone trusted anything that came out of Zuckerberg's mouth for the last 20 years.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoArguably, inception The "Dumb fucks" story is rather well-known Any reference to it used to get downvoted. HN commenters would argue he has since changed, that he's older and wiser But I also recall reading about a conversation he had with a classmate who started a similar database of student information at Harvard. Like the Winklevoss twins, he thought Zuckerberg was copying his idea. I believe he went on to create a website of searchable case law. Was his name Greenspan, I can't remember Anyway, the gist of what I remember is that in a conversation with Greenspan, Zuckerberg specifically cited federal court as the place where his dishonesty would hit a wall, or something like that Many years and billions of dollars later, it seems like this may be coming true
- Roark66 3mo agoA good example. In cases where social media are clearly intentionally harmful they should be prosecuted under existing laws. Instead of blocking under 16 year old from social media we should fix it. Via courts if needed. Also the CEOs should go to jail if convicted.
- pickleglitch 3mo agoI hope they lose and it bankrupts them. I'd like to see Zuckerberg thrown in prison. However, I would like to know what happens that $1.4T? Like, do the states that sued just add it to a slush fund? How would it be used to help mitigate the damage they have done?
- slibhb 3mo agoWe look back on the (at the time influential) claim that rock/metal/etc "corrupts the youth" as a quaint moral panic. Modern views about social media are our version of that same silly claim. Future people will look back on all these comments comparing Facebook to crack with the same amused bewilderment as we look back on the PMRC.
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- bryan_w 3mo agoIndeed it would be silly to prosecute the record execs because they found a report called "what are the youths listening to" or even with the video game moral panic of the 90s, going after game companies because they found a report titled "Is Laura Croft setting unrealistic beauty standards for teens" at gamedev companies
- entech 3mo agoThis comparison surprises me. There's a difference between content people like organically and content engineered by an army of psychologists to exploit our primal responses. It's like comparing a baker whose apple pie people genuinely liked and bought, to a company that laced their pie with cocaine to create physical dependency, then bribed stores to stock only theirs for a while.
- upmind 3mo agodo all social media sites not suffer from the same issues or am I wrong? e.g., snapchat, tiktok, youtube? Why is Meta being singled out?
- altairprime 3mo agoSomeone always goes first. Boiling the ocean starts with boiling one pot. Experience and case law gained makes the next pot boil slower or faster.
- raffael_de 3mo agoAfD MEP Mary Khan, on the other hand, complained that a law that had already been rejected was being revived through the back door using salami-tactics until the desired outcome was achieved. No one wants to weaken child protection, but that should not justify putting all citizens under general suspicion and legitimizing mass surveillance. Pretty reasonable stance compared to Social Democrats: Nevertheless, the Social Democratic group caved in beforehand and signaled its approval for the urgency procedure, which ensured the necessary majority.
- tsoukase 3mo agoIt is sad but inevitable in a free market. The line between a good and an addictive product is often blur. OK, cocaine is addictive and a nice restaurant meal is good but everything else lies inbetween. In the end, I believe after 3-5 year Meta will pay 1.4 billions instead of trillions and 'business as usual'.
- dgellow 3mo agoBut we don’t live in libertarian dystopias and do regulate markets. We don’t have to accept that type of behavior from company leadership
- b3ing 3mo agoThey could pay this off in like 1-6 months I imagine
- zombot 3mo agoOne can always dream. One of the big villain companies getting hit with a fine that's actually substantial for a change would serve as a beacon of hope.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo agoHere is the Meta Submission Regarding State AGs Penalty and Disgorgement Charts and Supporting Materials that is the source for these articles https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...
- tim333 3mo agoI was trying to find the law to see how they define addictive to children in a harmful way vs in a good or ok way like reading, bicycles etc. It's easy to say one's good, one's bad but I wonder how you define it legally?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo agoI wonder how much Mark will give Donnie to make this all go away?