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still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds "Meta has long argued it could not have misled consumers about whether its services were addi
by hugodan 1mo ago
still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds
"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
- aprilthird2021 1mo agoThis is crazy, Meta is not solely responsible for people and kids having addiction to their phones (very similar if not identical to social media addiction). Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
- forestrywat 1mo agoThey are a very, very, very significant contributor.
- Wolfbeta 1mo agoWho is paying for their internet access?
- forestrywat 1mo agoImagine being so out of touch that you think parents are generally equipped with the knowledge, features, and emotional capacity to manage their child's entire exposure to the internet in a way they cannot or will not circumvent. Laughable.
- techpression 1mo agoImagine thinking parents stand a snowballs chance in hell fighting against products explicitly made to exploit their children from companies spending billions on it. It’s like 0.00001% of parents that has those skills, if that.
- account42 1mo agoHow is that at all relevant to the comment you're replying to. We don't need to find a single party we can apply all blame to.
- fuzzfactor 1mo agoI think some blame lies with whoever was paying for Facebook's internet access, and encouraged them to foist more of a predatory approach and cast a wider net than would have been possible otherwise. 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
- nefarious_ends 1mo ago[flagged]
- kstrauser 1mo agoTrue. They’re just one of the largest companies who deliberately engineered their software to be addictive, the Sacklers of social media, if you will.
- datsci_est_2015 1mo ago> Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that. 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” Similar to tobacco products.
- LevGoldstein 1mo agoThey profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.
- freejazz 1mo agoThey don't have to be solely responsible. What they are responsible for are their own actions.
- Barbing 1mo ago>[irreparably damaging] children's minds I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
- bakies 1mo agoMoney!
- Barbing 1mo agoFigure his own mental steelmans are legitimately more complex, though. And more faulty.
- vrganj 1mo agoSome popular ones: * 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. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23963971/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23963971/
- ryandrake 1mo agoYou're being very kind and generous with the benefit of the doubt, like he even needs his own mental steelman. 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.
- api 1mo agoThe smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible." 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.
- 65 1mo agoAll those smart Stanford grads got to make the world a better place by psychologically damaging millions of children.
- pwg 1mo ago> Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly. So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.
- account42 1mo ago> The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible." The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
- intended 1mo agoSome nations have great laws that deal with lootboxes. I beleive one approach is making odds known, and another is simply placing fines on firms that use loot box mechanics.
- bgro 1mo ago[flagged]
- giwook 1mo agoAgreed, especially considering Meta made $60.46 billion in profit in 2025 alone.
- Aunche 1mo agoThis is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.
- thevinter 1mo ago>one notable case had them pay 4.2mil Ok so if most individuals that care sue them it will become a.. $17B fine. Doesn't sound that impressive either.
- mapotofu 1mo agoThe system rewards psychopaths like Mark. Decent people, like Tom from MySpace, cash their check when they have more than they need. Demons, like Mark, want more and more and more and more- they will go to any lengths to get it because screw everyone else, they are lessers. That’s Mark and that’s the system rewarding him. We all know Tom is way cooler.
- superxpro12 1mo agonot a recognized psychiatric condition as they employ how many psychiatrists on staff to specifically engineer this addition. i hate that the standard of evidence for these claims is impossibly high. Like you need an email from zuck himself that says "i want to mind rape young boys"... when there's mountains of evidence of them working to that exact goal... they just didnt say "mind rape young boys". The actions and results speak plainly enough. WE dont need zuck himself to confirm it.
- tiahura 1mo agoAmerica defaults to free. That's very unsettling for those that prefer an authoritarian approach. Maybe all these state AGs knew there was a good chance of losing because the facts aren't as strong as the narrative?
- BugsJustFindMe 1mo ago> "America defaults to free. That's very unsettling for those that an authoritarian approach." 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.
- tiahura 1mo agoThe general proposition is that the default for freedom is strongest regarding communication.
- carljungslabtek 1mo agoUsing dark UX patterns to get people hooked on your product isn’t “communication”. The product may contain communication but nobody is saying instagram and facebook shouldn’t be able to exist as communication platforms.
- BugsJustFindMe 1mo ago"Communication" includes things like fraud that are understood to be inherently harmful to other individuals and also to society at large and for which there are no sane or moral defenses. So, no, there is no default position for "communication" without further qualification.
- butlike 1mo agoWhy is cocaine in food bad but refined sugar is fine?
- groundzeros2015 1mo agoAre we going to pretend that internet did not expose inappropriate content to children prior to Facebook?
- lazide 1mo agoIt was more organic, less profitable and mechanized.
- tedggh 1mo agoThere were definitely horrible places on the internet pre Facebook that were popular among kids like Rotten and Ogrish. But there was not a trillion dollar company investing billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists on research to attract and hook kids to their platform. This is not remotely comparable.
- EagnaIonat 1mo agoThe targeted adverts to kids was more horrific. Like targeting troubled male teens with gun adverts.
- groundzeros2015 1mo agoDoesn’t Facebook invest a significant part to protect their brand by limiting and censoring content? Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
- freejazz 1mo ago>Doesn’t Facebook invest a significant part to protect their brand by limiting and censoring content? 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.
- butlike 1mo agoThey invented the red notification badge. You know, the thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content of people doing better things than you in more exotic places than you. The thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content that makes you feel bad about yourself.
- hliyan 1mo agoAgreed. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that ad-hoc legal action and regulations are just stop gap measures in a losing battle, and that any remedy needs to be more foundational. For example: mandate that every job description in any private corporation include a list of ethics responsibilities, and that employees may challenge management directives that in their view breach those responsibilities, and if management response is unsatisfactory, that employees may raise the concern to relevant authority. This will limit management/shareholder/board ability to pressure/incentivize an otherwise individually rational workforce to collectively behave like a psychopath.
- DharmaPolice 1mo agoNot to sound too cynical but it's extremely hard to imagine that ever passing into law in the places which need it most.
- hliyan 1mo agoDemocracy was also extremely hard to imagine and considered impractical (even in the face of ancient Greek evidence) a few hundred years ago. And then it became the norm.
- tsunamifury 1mo agoLaws don’t stop people from doing what they want to do. It is incredibly naive to believe so
- hliyan 1mo agoThat is precisely what laws do by definition and have done in practice, from the Code of Hammurabi to this day.
- tsunamifury 1mo agoHuh amazing. That’s why no one e breaks them then …
- 1mo ago
- philipallstar 1mo agoThe real trick was convincing parents to buy devices for their kids. That's by far the worst thing he's ever done.
- DANmode 1mo agoI thought texting and / or AOL Instant Messenger was responsible for that!
- philipallstar 1mo agoDefinitely not! Texting was so small-scale, and text-only, that it was fine. Big chat groups where people are bullied (or some are not invited), and nasty images are the problems there.
- RunSet 1mo ago"Meta denies wrongdoing in settling claims" 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.
- oofbey 1mo agoThis is a massive gift to FB. $17B paid is a few weeks of revenue and a single quarter’s worth of profit. But even worse, this is paid out over 10 years! A billion dollars per year to eliminate this major risk is an absolute gift from the AGs. They’re cowards who should be ashamed.