Court filings allege Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public

https://time.com/7336204/meta-lawsuit-files-child-safety/

by binning • 8 months ago

415 161 8 months ago

kryogen1c2• 8 months ago

a Meta spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. "The full record will show that for over a decade, we have listened to parents, researched issues that matter most, and made real changes to protect teens

Omegalol. Cigarette maker introduces filter, cares about your health.

mtillman• 8 months ago

Every cig exec lied under oath and only received monetary fines.

kryogen1c2• 8 months ago

The comparison was not accidental. I expect a similar, meaningless outcome for poisoning children.

flag_fagger3• 8 months ago

Cigarette makers were a dying cry of the old aristocracy. Silicon Valley is the rallying cry of the new aristocracy.

While I don’t quite believe they’ll achieve their Feudal dreams in the near-medium future. I do expect the US to transition to a much more explicitly an oligarchic republic as a large, with the pretense of “Government of the people, by the people, for the people” is largely pushed to the side.

Only solution seems to be to drop out of society to whatever degree possible.

nielsbot• 8 months ago

I bet true but misleading:

listened to parents

...but not taken significant actions

researched issues that matter most

...but ignored the results of the research

made real changes to protect teens

...sure, insignificant changes

binarymax3• 8 months ago

Look, most of us here know that meta is a terrible company that has done terrible things. But what is actually being done about it? So far just some token fines and petty wrist slaps. What’s really the plan here? Because they’re not going to stop.

PessimalDecimal• 8 months ago

Are there any serious attempts to enact a "corporate death penalty" in the US? Is there even a viable route to getting something like that in the current regime?

binarymax3• 8 months ago

My opinion is that if corporate personhood is OK, then the corporation should face the same consequences as people do when they break the law. So facilitation of human trafficking should go to criminal court.

llbbdd• 8 months ago

Only among the terminally unserious

dragonwriter3• 8 months ago

Charter revocation is, I think, technically on the books in every state, but its not used for variety of reasons, one of which is because while it destroys the corporate entity, it mostly punishes the people least responsible for any wrongdoing (it can sometimes be accompanied by real punishment for the responsible actors, but those are separate processes that doesn’t require charter revocation, such as individual criminal prosecution or civil process that ends with fines, being barred from serving as a corporate officer, etc.)

nalekberov• 8 months ago

For them these fines are just cost of doing business. Apparently politicians don't care too, for them imposing fines is all about bringing extra money from time to time.

blactuary2• 8 months ago

We have vote with our dollars/attention and stop using their products. Including pressuring our friends and family to stop using them.

binarymax3• 8 months ago

Has that ever really worked? And considering meta has billions of users on not just Facebook, but also WhatsApp and instagram, I’m skeptical. I know people who hate meta, but can’t shake instagram.

tjpnz• 8 months ago

When my kids were born I told my family I wouldn't be posting their pictures on any Meta owned platform. That was all I needed to move the family group, photos etc. to another app.

kspacewalk2• 8 months ago

Specifically when it comes to children, lots of jurisdictions are enacting actual non-bullshit age verification to ensure children aren't on social media. In my opinion this is real, substantive change.

Aurornis9• 8 months ago

But what is actually being done about it?

Serious question: What exactly do you want to see done? I mean real specifics, not just the angry mob pitchfork calls for corporate death penalty or throwing Mark Zuckerberg in jail.

dkdcio7• 8 months ago

ban digital advertisement at a federal level and 95% of the underlying problems are solved at the incentive level

wyre• 8 months ago

Larger fines, more robust methods for Meta to keep children off their platforms, more robust methods to stop the spread of propaganda and spam on their platforms, for Meta to start prioritizing connection between others instead of attention.

knuppar2• 8 months ago

angry mob pitchfork calls
corporate death penalty

I don't know man these don't seem very specific. From your whole comment I do agree Mark should be in jail

slg6• 8 months ago

Amend Section 230 so that it does not apply to content that is served algorithmically. Social media companies can either allow us to select what content we want to see by giving us a chronological feed of the people/topics we follow or they can serve us content according to some algorithm designed to keep us on their platform longer. The former is neutral and deserves protection, but the latter is editorial. Once they take on that editorial role of deciding what content we see, they should become liable for the content they put in front of us.

__MatrixMan__2• 8 months ago

Other shareholders in jail also.

If my dog bites somebody, I'm on the hook. It should be no different with companies.

We have to create incentives to not invest in troublesome companies. Fines are inadequate, they incentivize buying shares in troublesome companies and then selling them before the harm comes to light.

flag_fagger3• 8 months ago

Isn’t this what we have RICO for?

she was shocked to learn that the company had a “17x” strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.”

There’s no way in hell this isn’t just tacitly incentivized the facilitation of trafficking activities through the site.

worik2• 8 months ago

Serious question: What exactly do you want to see done?

Confiscate their wealth

tehjoker• 8 months ago

Why not? Those are effective ideas, it’s just impractical because our political system is so insulated from public input.

bluefirebrand• 8 months ago

I think with the harm that these companies are doing, the angry pitchfork mobs are a serious suggestion and not just hyperbole anymore

Keep in mind that not very long ago some random person assassinated an insurance CEO and many people's reaction was along the lines of "awesome, that fat cat got what he deserved"

Don't underestimate how much of society absolutely loathes the upper class right now.

I would bet that many people are one layoff away from calling for execs to get much worse than jail

BrenBarn2• 8 months ago

I don't really get why corporate death penalty and Zuck in jail is not a good idea. It might not be the best idea, but I think it would absolutely be better than what we have now. Even a random-chainsaw-esque destruction of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple would be better than what we have now.

Drupon• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Xi_Jinping_A...

fakedang• 8 months ago

For one, I'd like the EU to use this as evidence to straight up ban Meta apps. If countries can ban TikTok, why not extend the same privilege to Meta?

But then again, the EU are a bunch of vacuous chicken shits incapable of pulling their heads out of their arses, never mind safeguarding their own children.

Refreeze52243• 8 months ago

Why is the corporate death penalty or Zuckerberg in jail reduced to angry mob ideas? I think both are valid responses to the social harms that Facebook and social media generally have caused.

webdoodle• 8 months ago

They aren't going to stop because LifeLog was as Darpa project before they found a private stoog to build it for the military. Remember it's only dystopian to spy on every aspect of a persons life, if YOUR THE GOVERNMENT. Private entities in the U.S. basically can do anything they want, especially now when they can rent a President too pardon it away.

kiba• 8 months ago

They're monopolies. Break them up, heavily regulate, or tax their economic rent privileges.

Georgism gave a good lenses on these kind of issue. All the sudden, late stage capitalism starts looking like monopolies.

nccn67• 8 months ago

Its basically like the history of money before banks got regulated and central banks emerged to regulate money printing. In this case its all about Attention which is functioning exactly like currency.

pksebben• 8 months ago

At the surface, it's an antitrust issue (the scale of Meta doesn't have the capacity to behave better, so it doesn't). This, like so many other things, can be traced back to a broken system of governance on a root level.

Our system of incentives, operating within a system of governmental authority baked in an age where gunpowder was the new hotness, leads to a place where the movement of individual bits of law or policy don't matter. The forces at work will roll back whatever you do to make the social situation better, if they are antithetical to the interests of capital. Fix healthcare, and the insurance companies will find ways to twist it to their profit. Fix housing, and the banks and real estate developers will find ways to charge rent anyway.

The coupling between decision making and the vox populi is weak and must be strengthened. The coupling between decision making and capital is strong and must be broken. Unless we can accomplish either, any change we make is cosmetic.

I think what we need is a dissolution of representatives in favor of a more direct form of democracy, but most dismiss this as looney/impossible. I'm inclined to agree about the impossibility but that just kind of lands us back at 'what the hell do we do about it'.

Ranked choice is a good start, perhaps. Might not 'fix it' but maybe it's a foot in the door.

ThinkBeat• 8 months ago

For a while I worked for a company that was doing some shady and unethical things, but just within the law.

I took em a while to understand how things worked and when I did I found a different job.

Now this enterprise I left, could never have done what they did it was not for the developers that made it possible.

When we talk about the giants on social media, it it us, the developers who make it possible for them to do what they do.

If you are frustrated about how they are not being stopped from doing what they do, encourage people to leave. They money is great, but doe sit make it worth it?

From the other side, let us say that the US shut down Meta and the rest of the social media beasts, how many developers would be out on the street?

chad_c• 8 months ago

Capital is orders of magnitude more powerful than labor. Until that changes, this story will be repeated.

loloquwowndueo• 8 months ago

Is it the same as this basically? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817

macintux• 8 months ago

Yes. I've flagged this post, hopefully it'll be merged.

mlmonkey• 8 months ago

Meta misled the public?!?!? You don't say!

At this point nothing surprises me from Meta.

concinds• 8 months ago

Check the front page before splitting an existing front-page discussion.

blaufast2• 8 months ago

So much of this audience already knows the job is to collect comprehensive analytics and never run the analyses on your product’s externalities.

to be obvious enough to downplay, it must be impossible to miss while looking the other way. To be impossible to miss, it must be inextricably linked to the profits.

dalka• 8 months ago

It's even more egregious in this case because Meta's employees were turning a blind eye to child sexual exploitation that they knew fine well their work was enabling.

Maybe those fat bonuses and generous stock options wiped away the feelings of guilt, if these Silicon Valley sociopaths even felt any in the first place.

blaufast2• 8 months ago

We’re all just trying to get our nut.

fn-mote2• 8 months ago

You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation

So although this is being spun as “trafficking”, that doesn’t seem accurate.

This classification sounds like it includes selling “your own services”.

olelele• 8 months ago

Similar to roblox debate raging now no?

sidcool• 8 months ago

Another report. Sadly nothing will come out of it. 5 years down the line there will be another smoking gun, accusing Meta of selling DNA data to advertisers illegally. Nada. Nothing will happen.

catigula• 8 months ago

Focusing on meta doing this is fine, but misses the mark.

Every tech company is harming the public for profits.

ChrisArchitect• 8 months ago

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46019817

pengaru• 8 months ago

Corporation prioritizes profits over social harm, news at 11.

You won't want to miss this breaking story - water is wet.

ta9000• 8 months ago

I mean, duh. They’re this generation’s cigarettes. Employees of Meta should be ashamed of themselves.

Edit: Meta employees, downvoting this comment won’t absolve you of your involvement in the largest child abuse organization we’ve seen yet. Look what your own company said about what it’s doing to teenage girls.

rvz• 8 months ago

They don't care. Grifters need to grift.

barbazoo• 8 months ago

The greed is just too strong. I hope they get help.

foofoo122• 8 months ago

17x strike policy for accounts that reportedly engaged in the “trafficking of humans for sex.”

Yep. You can engage in sexually trafficking people 16 times with a warning. 17th is just too much dude.

What sort of a deranged psychopath comes up with these rules?

foofoo122• 8 months ago

I can see from voting that this comment is highly controversial. It's actively being downvoted. Make of that what you like.

diogenescynic• 8 months ago

Social media is going to be seen to future generations the way we currently see tobacco and alcohol. Look at what social media has done to the wellbeing of teen girls. There's been a dramatic decline in the mental health of teen girls. All those filters, OF fans, stars with eating disorders (just look at the Wicked cast), is literally killing teen girls with social anxiety.

Aeroi• 8 months ago

The business model is misaligned with human's wellbeing. Everything can be traced back to this very problem.

MattRix• 8 months ago

This is true but it’s important to still blame the humans making specific harmful decisions as well.

brrNoBhmt2• 8 months ago

we'll milk teens like cows and we can't wait to stuff them into tiny little boxes, hooked up to and logged into our VR worlds where we serve all their needs while they serve ours. nothing sexual, there's places for that and we're not the types. we monitor our employees closely and can say that with certainty.

the current phase of social media is basically the scraping of minds. we throw hundreds of thousands of narrowly defined contexts at them, in different states and in between them. our systems learn, assimilate, adapt.

the world is going up in flames. we didn't do that. and we'd try to change it but we have a lot of data. it can't be done.

we've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. and we don't drink cheap milk. the food of the cows we get our milk from costs more than the compounded wealth of all graduates of an average European university at the end of their 30s and the health of the cows we get our milk from is better monitored, too. all for one glass of milk.

my first sentence was a provocation.

your teens will be fine. worry about their environment, not us. we know we lie in court. and you know why. because they kindly ask us to. they have friends and friends of friends who have been up our asses from day one. you think we know a lot? your intelligence services know a lot more. your local administrations and teachers conspire against your teens more often than you would like to know. some guys in your police likely know, too. as do your journalists and TV channels. it's more or less on a need to know, serve to know basis.

you think big tech is the threat? think again.

A/N: mostly gibberish, since I have no idea what I'm talking about but you're all wielding advanced tools and you're networked. you get it. I could kindly ask you to stop babbling. but without leverage nobody benefits.

brrNoBhmt2• 8 months ago

ok, I was mostly serious. let's think this through: dafuq are you pros doing?

it's 2025.

genetic variety. someone sampled every single cell in a human body even before they died (wahahahaha) ... no obfuscation after millions of years in safe enough environments for the sake of survival in zones in the middle between safety and "DANGER ZONE" ... sure, sure ...

tech is going well. democracy, ... well ... the pace of advancement is ... I mean ... retarded? impeded? "balanced"?

punched drugs on the streets? yes. I mean, it's a market, right? gudd for TV tropes, ey :D?

I don't even wanna do this, man. FFS.

tap-snap-or-nap• 8 months ago

All governments need to classify recommendation based algo driven media content delivery injected within subscriptions as gambling.

Court filings allege Meta downplayed risks to children and misled the public

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