Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

https://www.axios.com/2026/04/09/meta-social-media-addiction-ads

632 227 3 months ago

k33n5• 3 months ago

The idea that Meta is obligated to be so impartial that it must allow lawsuits against itself to be promoted on its own platform is a bit naive and utopian.

Its own TOS states that they won’t allow that.

gilrain• 3 months ago

Let’s force them to be obligated to do that, then. “Just let them hurt people, and then let them hide that hurt” kind of sucks for society.

nkrisc• 3 months ago

Fair enough. If they're not impartial then lets hold them accountable for the content published in their platform.

mc322• 3 months ago

To me that’s how it should be. They shouldn’t have to run ads against themselves yet they should be liable or accountable for harm they are found guilty of.

k33n5• 3 months ago

I’m not against these companies losing their Section 230 immunity. Social media platforms are, in my personal opinion, publishers in their current form.

If they went back to operating as “friends and family feed providers” then letting them keep their 230 immunity would be easier to justify.

schubidubiduba• 3 months ago

TOS are not laws. In fact, they often partially violate laws and those parts are then void. In some countries, anything written in TOS that is not "expected to be there" is void.

raincole3• 3 months ago

No one says ToS are laws and especially not the parent commenter.

zeroonetwothree3• 3 months ago

Ok but I don’t really see why this specific term would violate any law? Do we really want a society where platforms are forced to present speech that is harmful to them? If you own a store and I put a sign up on your wall advertising a rival store wouldn’t it be reasonable for you to disallow that?

mywittyname• 3 months ago

I kind of wish countries would just define, "terms of service" for everyone and not allow companies to modify them further.

3form2• 3 months ago

Maybe, but so what? Your remark lacks a conclusion.

Mine is that it could then well be required to do so by law. Companies are not individuals, so I don't think they are owed any freedoms beyond what is best for utility they can provide.

iinnPP• 3 months ago

I tend to agree with you on this. I wanted to add however that Meta itself lets so many TOS violating ads in, that it seems like special treatment for ads that are much less undesirable than the ads normally pushed.

It's not just a Meta issue either.

streetfighter64• 3 months ago

The idea that a company can override laws via its TOS is a bit strange.

BeetleB• 3 months ago

Genuinely curious. By not allowing a specific type of ad, what law are they breaking?

mirashii• 3 months ago

That idea was not expressed in the article, only the fact that the ads were removed. This is worth covering, especially when coupled with the context for what ads Meta regularly does allow. One does not have to believe that they're obligated to do so while also believing that it's incredibly scummy behavior that consumers should be aware of and question.

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...

freejazz• 3 months ago

Okay? They're exactly the assholes everyone says they are. That's the point.

hashmap• 3 months ago

at certain scales, reality has to win out over whatever ideal you have in your head about how things should be. facebook is massive, a lot of society is on it, and its a problem to make recourse invisible to people most affected by the thing stealing their attention.

Zigurd• 3 months ago

There are so many ads for nostrums, cults, get rich quick scams, and other junk that violate TOS, that Meta has a legitimacy problem with their TOS.

swiftcoder2• 3 months ago

The idea that Meta is obligated to be so impartial

Is their defence of Section 230 protections not in part rooted in that claim of impartiality?

nradov• 3 months ago

No. Section 230 doesn't mention anything about impartiality.

hansvm2• 3 months ago

Companies have to inform affected individuals of data breaches, especially when HIPAA gets involved. Brokers have to inform clients of transaction errors. Auto manufacturers have to inform owners of recalls. Retirement funds have to inform plan participants of lawsuits involving those funds.

You don't even have to invoke the idea that Meta is big enough to be regulated as a public utility for this to have broad precedent in favor of forcing a malicious actor to inform its victims that they might be entitled to a small fraction of their losses in compensation.

zeroonetwothree3• 3 months ago

Well we aren’t discussing the government requiring meta to inform users. We are discussing whether meta can choose which private actors’ ads to allow. It would seem silly that a platform would be forced to allow all ads.

dcrazy2• 3 months ago

This is why courts are empowered to infringe upon the rights of parties to the case.

bilekas5• 3 months ago

"We will not allow trial lawyers to profit from our platforms while simultaneously claiming they are harmful."

Wow.. That is quite a statement. Am I right in saying that in order to claim for the class action lawsuit, which facebook has been 'found negligent', that the victims need to take an action collectively in order to claim ? IE They need to be reached somehow to inform them of the possibility ?

Seems the most obvious place to advertise would be Meta.

I understand Meta can basically do whatever they like with their ToS but the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.

boringg2• 3 months ago

I mean those class action lawsuits enrich trial lawyers and maybe force companies to behave better (though i bet empirical evidence would show that its more a cost of business).

The 20$ dollars people get is nothing but a guise that the trial lawyers are helping people.

bilekas5• 3 months ago

I'm not sure if the lower price means that class actions shouldn't still be taken.

It's to allow companies to not have to deal with individual claims for each person. I see that the ranges can be substantial though, several thousands, but seems to be criteria.

Nearly nine months later, Mark received a notification that his claim had been approved. Two weeks after that, $186 was deposited into his bank account. While the amount wasn’t substantial, it covered a grocery run and a phone bill—and more importantly, it reminded him that companies can be held accountable, even in small ways. [0]

[0] https://peopleforlaw.com/blog/how-much-do-people-typically-g...

If the fine's don't dissuade companies from bad practices, the class actions with theoreticaly no upper limit might be a better option to enforce proper behaviour.

bwestergard• 3 months ago

They wouldn't profit if the cases didn't have merit.

3form2• 3 months ago

"Lawyer benefitting from cases about prostitution equals to a pimp" kind of argument.

giancarlostoro• 3 months ago

Would be really entertaining if all the lawyers affected banded together and made a class action lawsuit full of lawyers as the plaintiffs.

HumblyTossed2• 3 months ago

The judge should have ordered Meta to place a banner on FB so that everyone can see it and join if they're a victim.

shimman• 3 months ago

Wow this is a really good idea. I wonder if the various state trials happening as well should use this for remediation too.

It's not a hard thing to implement on their end and should be mandated by a judge as you said.

Filing this away for later use.

smsm42• 3 months ago

Not likely to survive 1st Amendment challenge - it is possible to compel somebody to certain speech as a result of losing a case, but doing this as a prerequisite when the case has just started is not likely to fly. Otherwise I could force Facebook (or any other platform) to publish anything just by suing them - and anybody could sue anybody else on virtually any grounds.

pixl974• 3 months ago

Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"

reactordev2• 3 months ago

Literally every ceo

bko• 3 months ago

Imagine NYT banning an ad in it's newspaper telling people how to cancel and sue NYT?

Wild stuff

akersten• 3 months ago

It would be a better analogy if tobacco companies sold ad space on their packs and chose not to do business with a private for-profit anti-smoking solicitation group.

roysting• 3 months ago

I understand the impulse, but there are not only significant differences, i.e., the requirement to add labeling to cigarettes was mostly a judicial or legislative action, but there is also that rather perverse fact that this kind of legislation that people are championing is often funded by profit and greed just like the harm being sued over.

The article even at least mentions that at least one of the suits is private equity funded; which generally will result in the partners and/or investors of the private equity firm and the attorneys suing, which are often all one and the same in what is just a financial and legal shell game, net tens of millions of dollars, while the supposed victims will end up with nothing but pennies on the dollar of harm and injury.

I get the impulse to also “cheer” for the lawsuits, but if you thought Meta, etc. are bad; you really don’t want to look into the vile pestilence that is the law firms that are basically organized crime too by the core definition of crime being an offense and harm upon society.

I don’t really know a solution for this problem because it is so rooted in the core foundation of this rotten system we still call America for some reason, but for the time being I guess, the only moderately effective remedy for harm and injury is to combat it with more harm and injury.

_doctor_love• 3 months ago

"But Black Dynamite! I sell drugs to the community!"

stronglikedan2• 3 months ago

the statement from the Meta spokesperson seems like an extremely bad idea.

All corporate CYA ideas sound that way, but ultimately end up benefiting the company in the end. Meta is right to do this. That's not to say it's right to do, but it's right for the company.

largbae• 3 months ago

Seems like the lawyers will profit from their platforms _by_ claiming they are harmful.

mrwh• 3 months ago

Meta wants to be an impartial platform only and exactly when it suits them to be.

tiberius_p• 3 months ago

That's exactly what they're saying.

kotaKat• 3 months ago

I mean, they spun up a bullshit "Oversight Board" that they can fully 100% choose to ignore and decline to implement their demands when they're made.

zeroonetwothree3• 3 months ago

I think there’s a clear difference in restricting advertising vs organic posts.

HWR_14• 3 months ago

What difference is that?

thimabi• 3 months ago

Meta does both. It has long been said that businesses have little organic reach in Meta’s platforms, as an incentive for them to use ads.

stronglikedan2• 3 months ago

Name one platform that doesn't, and I'm not just talking about lip service.

mbesto• 3 months ago

Signal?

_moof2• 3 months ago

There are degrees.

RobotToaster• 3 months ago

4chan?

bloqs• 3 months ago

It's not unilateral but if it is a commercial interest, then I'll agree that it usually is

latexr• 3 months ago

Not an excuse. We shouldn’t turn a blind eye to bad behaviour because “everyone does it”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

pocksuppet2• 3 months ago

Hacker Ne.... no wait, not that one either.

rurp2• 3 months ago

Yeah, glad to see Zuck is sticking with those strong free speech principles he couldn't wait to get back to last year.

alex11385• 3 months ago

Free speech which apparently includes https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178

I actually am more at odds with HN than many people might be because I think the lies surrounding covid and the censorship were absolutely wrong and platforms could genuinely after things like that lay claim to being unfairly directed, but you can tell Zuck doesn't actually care because he immediately started doing that

PaulHoule5• 3 months ago

Wow.

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it.

It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you an email asking if they could come around and pick up a Q.P. next Saturday I'd expect you to give the person a correction in person that they shouldn't do that again.

Not to say you should be like Epstein but I mean he and the people he corresponded with had some sense so there is is very little evidence of criminal activity in millions of emails.

At Facebook on the other hand all the time people sent emails about things that could just as easily been left as "dark matter" unexplained and minimally documented decisions but no it is like that M.F. Doom song "Rapp Snitch Knishes", like a bunch of children or something with no common sense at all.

Lord_Zero• 3 months ago

Damn whos buying a Q.P.??

jjtheblunt• 3 months ago

language failure on my end: what's a "Q.P."?

jmye• 3 months ago

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Nah, he just doesn't care. Nothing he does will ever get people (en masse, onesie, twosies don't matter) to stop using Meta products.

People can/will complain about him forever, but shitty people will continue to help him build things, and shitty people will continue to use them.

ModernMech• 3 months ago

Yes, it's called being a billionaire. I'm sure if clinicians actually studied this group of people, they would find strains of delusions of grandeur, paranoia, extreme risk taking behavior, lack of self control and self awareness, inability to deal with adversity and setbacks without emotional outbursts, inability to contain and dismiss intrusive antisocial thoughts.

I feel probably that the emotional maturity of most billionaires is at the toddler level or below, and I mean that quite seriously and literally.

glitchc• 3 months ago

When you have f.u. money, you get to say f.u., otherwise what's the point?

NickC25• 3 months ago

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Not sure he cares. He's literally got hundreds of billions of dollars to his name, and the corporation he founded is worth trillions.

hn_acker• 3 months ago

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Cory Doctorow describes Mark Zuckerberg's and Elon Musk's attitude toward other people as billionaire solipsism [1].

[1] https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-whe...

matheusmoreira• 3 months ago

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Yeah, it's called having-too-much-money-to-careitis.

analog8374• 3 months ago

Reddit is the same way. Poke a few sacred cows and suddenly you're banned for something you did 6 months ago that we aren't going to tell you about and no we don't want to discuss it.

Kafkaism is natural and organic.

Lihh27• 3 months ago

one tos clause and neutrality disappears. now meta decides which claims get reach

HumblyTossed2• 3 months ago

Do photogs do that on purpose, or does Zuck really always have that sociopath stare?

SpicyLemonZest• 3 months ago

Zuckerberg is a rich and high profile guy, so photographers capture many pictures of him, and news editors often find that choosing unflattering pictures of people their readers don't like is helpful for reach. This picture in particular was taken after he'd just finished testifying for 8 hours in a February trial, which I think would wear down the best of us, and even among Getty's extensive gallery of pictures taken then (https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/mark-zuckerber...) this one is particularly unflattering IMO.

alex11385• 3 months ago

Keep in mind Zuckerberg is someone who supports things like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791198

Zuckerberg was told about gay people being added to groups and it outed them by posting to their wall, and he ignored it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRYnocZFuc4

And obviously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1692122 (guess we don't get access to his other messages, though https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16770818)

His stare isn't the only thing about him that's sociopathic

Edit: oh yeah and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42651178

alex11385• 3 months ago

Guys, there's no need to insta-downvote. I provided substantive evidence. Look in the mirror, and evaluate who you work for

gorbachev• 3 months ago

Zuck and his minions are also responsible for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohingya_genocide

Your examples pale in comparison.

IncreasePosts• 3 months ago

I'm sure if people were taking 500 pictures of you, they would capture you in a state like that. Are you a sociopath?

folkrav• 3 months ago

Both.

username223• 3 months ago

It’s less unflattering than the legless avatar from his $80 billion waste of money.

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/yUEJgQzunhbnYYtsckup7i.jpg

pcardoso• 3 months ago

Reminds me of Carl Sagan’s Contact, where Haden, the millionaire funding Ellie’s work, made a TV ad blocker and then sued the TV companies when they refused to play ads for his product.

I wonder if that is what will happen next.

neuroelectron• 3 months ago

Reminds me of ChatGPT insisting all news about OpenAI is unverified speculation.

guywithahat• 3 months ago

There is a humor that these law firms won a case against Meta and the first thing they did is give them advertising money won from the court case. That said the ads sound pretty aggressive, and from what I've read it sounds like it wasn't a very fair decision. I understand the conflict of interest but I have sympathies for Meta here

mekdoonggi3• 3 months ago

I think these ads were to bait Meta into banning them (which they've done) and now the firm will follow up with a lawsuit because Meta suddenly is able to very rapidly decide what ads get shown if it's going to hurt their bottom line.

I do not have any sympathy for Meta.

josefritzishere• 3 months ago

So they remove class action lawsuits but not pedos. Got it.

mekdoonggi3• 3 months ago

I suspect the lawyers will use this as evidence as well. Meta can very quickly remove ads when it's going to cost them money.

bastard_op• 3 months ago

I wonder what would happen posting these ads to truth social and twitter.

Xeoncross2• 3 months ago

As an aside, class-action lawsuits seem less than ideal for the public. The awards benefit the lawyers and perhaps a small handful, but the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05. In addition, successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue.

Individuals bringing their own lawsuits seems like it would affect better change as 1) the award money would be better distributed instead of concentrated and 2) the amounts levied against the companies would be higher and more of concern than the class-action slap-on-the-wrist they currently get.

rokkamokka• 3 months ago

A hundred million identical court cases might not be too good for the legal system

ed312• 3 months ago

1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages? <-- maybe it makes sense for large corporations to carry insurance to pay for the potentially massive legal costs they could impose on governments? 2. Shouldn't we be able to quickly resolve these cases assuming there are no substantially different pieces of evidence?

SecretDreams• 3 months ago

Agreed. Naturally, the solution is to get meta to compensate for the actual and cumulative damage they've done to mankind. Then plaintiffs might actually benefit.

This is humanity vs Mark Zuckerberg.

wongarsu2• 3 months ago

Isn't that trivially fixed by raising court costs (that should go to whoever loses the suit) to cover the cost of judges, jury, admin expenses etc? I don't get the impression that this would make the justice system that much more prohibitively expensive than it already is, and would allow the legal system to scale to the case load

rurp2• 3 months ago

How does this address the most common case where many people were harmed a modest amount? Causing $100 of harm to a million people is a huge amount of damage that should be punished, but nobody is going to launch a full independent lawsuit for $100.

bityard• 3 months ago

successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue.

Only if you don't opt out. Individuals who opt out of being part of the class can still file their own suits. (Although it's not clear how successful you will be if your situation/harm is not substantially different from the other members of the class.)

doctorpangloss• 3 months ago

okay, what if the plaintiffs got "$50,000"? then to you, are class actions ideal for the public?

the flaw with class actions is not that they don't pay enough (or too much, to the wrong people) money. it's that they're reactive, which is to say, it's the same tradeoff with nearly all US commercial policy.

gradientsrneat• 3 months ago

I've opted in/not opted out to several class actions, and without saying the exact number, I'll say it was a lot more than that. Tech companies wouldn't be putting binding arbitration clauses/class action waivers/etc in their TOS if they weren't scared of being held accountable.

fn-mote• 3 months ago

the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05

This isn’t true at all. People where I live got $300 settlements from Facebook.

Parent post seems like anti-class action FUD.

Xeoncross2• 3 months ago

I've been in at least a dozen class action suites and the payouts are measured in cents. I'm glad someone got something more, but that's not common.

glaslong• 3 months ago

Thus begins another Streisand Effect meme campaign of

"MZ Is A Punk-Ass B

payed for by Person & Guy LLP"

fdeage• 3 months ago

"Anxiety. Depression. Withdrawal. Self-harm. These aren't just teenage phases — they're symptoms linked to social media addiction in children."

Seems like they couldn't write even three lines without a LLM.

boelboel2• 3 months ago

Maybe being unable to write us another symptom

WesolyKubeczek• 3 months ago

LLMs love this style, but they love it because it's just about every single piece of advertisement writing for the last aeon or so, and it's a mighty chunk of their training corpora.

skeeter2020• 3 months ago

Can't we all just agree there are no GOOD people in this situation? Meta, class-action lawyers, PE and big money that funds the lawsuits as a profit venture... The one thing they all appear to share: parasites extracting resources from their host.

ginkgotree• 3 months ago

Social Media, and specifically Facebook / Meta, will go down in history as one of the worst developments in technology in the 21st century. As Frances Haugen stated in her testimony, Mark Zuckberg needs to be removed from the helm at Meta.

wvenable• 3 months ago

I think television has done more harm, politically.

boelboel2• 3 months ago

Radio did plenty of harm as well (especially post 1987). Rush Limbaugh had a peak audience of 20-30 million listeners a week in the 90s. The current state of politics might've been unpreventable, at least in the US.

vachina• 3 months ago

They started out good and then cranked the engagement trap to the max when they realize value of a captive audience.

bcjdjsndon• 3 months ago

Hang on a minute, meta apparently didn't have the time to be checking the content of adverts they get paid to serve when it was child porn, what's changed all of a sudden?

henry2023• 3 months ago

The crypto-“investing” deep fakes impersonating recognizable names are up and running too.

mekdoonggi3• 3 months ago

This one actually cost them money.

heresie-dabord• 3 months ago

Excellent point. Suddenly Corporatron finds it easy to censor content in its product.

But why must we limit ourselves to simplistic, false dichotomies such as "Good vs Evil", "Education vs Ignorance", "Community Well-Being vs Disinformation and Arrant Nonsense", "Democracy and Social Confidence vs Propaganda and Conspiratorial Mayhem", and "Mental Health vs Despair and Self-Harm" ? We really are focused on building apps that people love.

varispeed• 3 months ago

I wonder when they'll tackle literal porn showing up in Instagram shorts. If you want to browse Instagram in public, forget it.

shevy-java• 3 months ago

I think it is time to disband Facebook. Ever since they attempted to infiltrate the linux ecosystem via age sniffing, they really need to go. Corporate systemd can also go - we should really clean up the whole ecosystem. What ever happened to "privacy first?

elAhmo• 3 months ago

We can effectively trace all of the problems we have today in a global scale back to social media.

TiredOfLife• 3 months ago

Exactly. Without social media there would have been no nazis.

petre• 3 months ago

Bierhalle, the social media of the 20s, to only without the personal data hoarding.

NERD_ALERT• 3 months ago

I don’t disagree that social media has played a massive role in changing the world in a negative way. This is a very far reaching claim though and one that kinda misses the forest for the trees. The problem is that fundamentally capitalism demands that companies find more ways to siphon more money from customers every quarter or they fail.

Social media is a perfect storm for the elites in this system. It’s a CIA wet dream. It’s literally a globalized and hyper personalized propaganda distribution platform. This is the inevitable outcome of capitalism and human behavior. Meta’s whole purpose is to create the most optimized pipeline for accepting money from 3rd parties in exchange for convincing as many people as possible of what they want those people to believe.

Social media is evil but it’s also the natural course of what happens with current technology and the incentives of capitalism.

hkpack• 3 months ago

I don’t know why it’s CIA wet dream, while it’s mostly used against western democracies.

Are people in CIA incompetent?

themafia2• 3 months ago

fundamentally capitalism demands

Wall Street makes those demands. Those demands are backed up by court cases and precedent. Nothing about this is synonymous with "capitalism."

It’s a CIA wet dream.

And they spend a significant amount of money. Is this "capitalism" still? Or are there more specific terms that would apply more directly to this arrangement?

Social media is evil

The US is the largest manufacturer and seller of weapons in the world.

AmericanOP• 3 months ago

So thank the ~80,000 employees at Facebook working tirelessly to make the platform as shoddy as possible.

Legend24402• 3 months ago

All the problems? Really?

engeljohnb2• 3 months ago

The words "scale back to" are vague, but I'm struggling to think of any current global problems that weren't at least exacerbated by social media.

ElijahLynn• 3 months ago

I'd say the root is circadian rhythm disruption. Artificial lighting, social media, etc.

mrweasel• 3 months ago

Assuming that we'll come to our senses, I think well be looking back at social media, in it's current form, the same way we now look at the Victorians using opium as cough medicine. It works, but holy shit are you doing it wrong.

bryan_w• 3 months ago

I'm pretty sure you're thinking of tuberculosis, not social media

nutjob2• 3 months ago

I'd say 'social problems', but otherwise entirely true.

One of the strangest things I find is that people will spend serious money to buy a house somewhere they don't have to be exposed to the great unwashed yet will happily expose their brains to the worst of the worst via social media.

renjimen• 3 months ago

Not social media. Advertising, and any business that is funded by advertising. Social media before the maturing of internet advertising was great.

_moof2• 3 months ago

That is... not true.

Social media may have been an important tool for creating some of the circumstances we're in, but the causes go back much farther.

dredmorbius• 3 months ago

This is excessively reductive.

Media (social or otherwise) is a force multiplier. Ultimately it is the sensory, feedback, and control mechanism for a social system. And yes, if you change the informational behaviour of a system you fundamentally change that system's behaviour, there are still other factors at play.

Corruption, inequality, biases (themselves often reinforced through media, yes), environment, and various other endogenous and exogenous factors also come in to play. I'd also call in other informational elements, including widespread surveillance systems and AI, which operate in at least part outside the scope of social media.

That social media exacerbates many of our present problems I'd agree to. That it's fundamental to all of them, not so much.

mechoblast• 3 months ago

I am not convinced that even if we had less corruption, inequality, environmental issues that we wouldnt still see the fragmentation of society and the rise of populism that we see today.

Social media algorithms explicitly optimise for isolationism and extremism, cultivating rage stemming from small disagreements, which are simply a fact of life.

The only way to solve this is if there were no disagreements or differing opinions to amplify, which is sadly impossible.

neilv2• 3 months ago

Idea of something that undergraduate colleges could do, to encourage reflection about ethics in careers:

Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.

Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.

I speculate that effects of this could include:

1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.

2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).

Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.

The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)

taormina• 3 months ago

They already have ethics classes in college. The unethical already don’t care. Students already do basic research but when the market is so shit, do you really expect them to permanently hamstring their careers by torpedoing their only offer? Especially given that as a fresh college grad, it’s not like anyone cares about your opinion anyways. So let’s guilt the vaguely ethical ones into never getting involved and leaving all the sociopaths to run the show. This is an idea destined for success.

neilv2• 3 months ago

Ethics classes (and certifications/trainings, like for doing human subjects research) are another thing that students are incentivized and conditioned to cheat on, rather than to reflect upon.

I'm talking about a poll that raises awareness across the entire student population, in a low-cost way, with no incentive to cheat nor to do anything other than give honest answers.

Regarding whether awareness of ethics would penalize those with any ethical tendency:

We can already see the last 2 decades of rampant unethical behavior throughout tech companies. Virtually every tech company knowingly sells out its users to data brokers, for example. Sociopaths already dominate, and have conditioned everyone below them to behave in an at least compliant way even when doing something unethical.

It's too bad we're starting late on that absolutely pervasive ethics problem, but we can't make the problem any worse by trying an education intervention now. And it's the traditional job of colleges to do this -- not to pump out oblivious worker drones.

arendtio• 3 months ago

I love it, because it shows that advertisement is communication as well.

Communication is highly regulated for good reasons, and advertisement is not. This is as if telecommunication companies would disconnect calls when what is being said does not fit their agenda.

This should be illegal for advertising companies as well.

finghin• 3 months ago

I rarely say this, but very fitting username.

jerf• 3 months ago

At the risk of going against the gestalt, Facebook openly and publicly rejecting the ads is actually one of the better outcomes. They could have just put their thumbs on the scale, deprioritizing them, serving them to people they think are least likely to bite, etc. Lying about the number of times it was served because, after all, who can check? Many of us suspect the ad platforms already do this pretty routinely through one mechanism or another anyhow, after all.

It isn't reasonable to ask a platform to host content that is literally about suing them, not because of "freedom" concerns or whether or not Facebook is being hypocritical, but more because in the end there isn't a "fair" way for them to host that. The constraints people want to put on how Facebook would handle that ends up solving down to the null set by the time we account for them all. Open, public rejection is actually a fairly reasonable response and means the lawyers at least know what is up and can respond to a clear stimulus.

lurk2• 3 months ago

It isn't reasonable to ask a platform to host content that is literally about suing them

Explicit rejection is better than opacity but better still is public accountability. Meta’s properties have a combined userbase that amounts to just over 1 in 4 people on earth; these platforms should have been regulated as utilities a long time ago. Suppose I wanted to run ad campaigns advocating for antitrust legislation targeting social media companies and ended up getting booted off of all of the major platforms; what feasible method is there for me to advance these ideas that could possibly compete with the platforms’ own abilities to influence public opinion?

crazygringo2• 3 months ago

I mean, I don't like Meta at all, but what do you expect? If you want to run a full-page in the New York Times that criticizes the New York Times, they're going to refuse to run it as well. Private companies generally don't publish things that run counter to their interests.

It would certainly be interesting if we wanted legislation to force private companies who provide paid ad space to publish ads that paid the most regardless of the content, but then that opens up a whole other can of worms. What if the ad offering the most money is racist and horrible, or disgustingly obscene? At that point you start needing the government to decide what is allowed to be banned and what isn't, and then it's meddling in speech which is prohibited by the first amendment.

So this just seems like an obvious non-story to me. Of course Meta is removing these ads, because pretty much any advertising platform would do the same about ads that criticized it.

xuhu• 3 months ago

Online stores don't remove 1-star reviews of their products from their store. Do they ?

alex43578• 3 months ago

Yes, they very frequently do.

mschuster91• 3 months ago

Taking down "bad" Google reviews is an entire industry these days [1].

And of course there are scammers on all sides - not just legitimately bad stores trying to whitewash their online presence, but also entire scammer rackets that extort legitimately good stores by flooding them with BS reviews [2].

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-shady-companies-remove-ba...

[2] https://9now.nine.com.au/a-current-affair/inside-the-extorti...

indymike• 3 months ago

New York Times that criticizes the New York Times,

This has happened.

the government to decide what is allowed to be banned and what isn't,

This is a civil lawsuit where people are trying to a) prove they were harmed and b) be compensated for that harm. The government is just the referee.

Meta is removing these ads, because pretty much any advertising platform would do the same about ads that criticized it.

Which was not very smart because the next step will be a court order requiring them to put a banner on ever page with a link to sign up to join the lawsuit - for free.

crazygringo2• 3 months ago

This has happened.

Source?

xorcist• 3 months ago

This may sound reasonable but isn't at all how newspapers are run. You can absolutely buy an ad in the New York Times criticizing the New York Times. Within reason of course, as you said the are private entities allowed to take on any customers they want, but in general newspapers hold journalistic integrity as an ideal and will allow most things as long as they aren't defamatory, unethical or downright illegal.

The ad sellers and the journalists are normally separate and will not interfer much with one another's work. It also helps that they never say no to money. I don't know about the New York Times specifically but similar things have happened many times in other newspapers, and there is such a thing as a paid editorial. Those are usually clearly marked as such, but it's basically the same thing.

(However, there may be other reasons why you might want to go with a competitor instead, and not pay the newspaper you hate $100k.)

6thbit2• 3 months ago

NYT has more than enough bandwidth and process to vet every ad they run, which must be in the order of 10s or 100s.

Meta runs ads in the order of hundreds of thousands or millions, and constantly allows very questionable things.

teunispeters• 3 months ago

I mean it probably shows that "common carrier" protection should emphatically not apply to them, but what do I know?

6thbit2• 3 months ago

Thought it was clickbait/circumstantial but they are quoting an actual spokesperson saying they are doing it on purpose !!

"We're actively defending ourselves against these lawsuits and are removing ads that attempt to recruit plaintiffs for them," a Meta spokesperson tells Axios.

siruwastaken• 3 months ago

Legally finding plaintiffs, who can sue us for our illegal machinations is not allowed on our platform. What a world we live in. If this isn't the simplest demonstration of monopolization of social media that Facebook has, then I don't know what is.

Traubenfuchs• 3 months ago

Would you allow it on yours? As a shareholder or on the board of directors of your company I would not be pleased.

Nothing nefarious about that.

data-ottawa• 3 months ago

You’re either an open platform or you’re not.

Why can Meta run fake ads of my prime minister or the CBC to front scams with no due process, but for this they can use their judgement to block?

I know they’re an American company and my complaints are Canadian, but the double standard stinks.

abustamam3• 3 months ago

Did anyone ever accuse Meta of being an open platform though?

worik2• 3 months ago

Did anyone ever accuse Meta of being an open platform though?

My memory says it was Meta who said that. Zuck himself....

acdha• 3 months ago

Isn’t that their defense against responsibility for their customers’ content? Having some broad filtering for legal requirements or scams is one thing but if they’re doing this it seems like support for cases alleging that they have editorial control and therefore responsibility.

bilekas5• 3 months ago

I don't know Meta ever claimed to be an open platform, Twitter did though. It used to be an almost 'human protocol'. But as humans, it was flawed.

nubinetwork• 3 months ago

fake cbc ads

I see those through google more than I do through FB ads. /shrug

garfieldnate• 3 months ago

You can't expect a company to support you in directly hurting them. This reminds me of a guy I know that sued his bank regarding a loan, but he used a terrible lawyer. The bank pretty quickly took their own action, including stopping all payments from his account (as they claimed that the money was theirs).

flawn• 3 months ago

It's not any company, its Meta and the channels they administrate come with a set of responsibilities and principles, and one such is not to break these by arbitrary, willful removal of totally legal ads.

gorgonian• 3 months ago

The bank stole his money, claiming it was theirs? That’s a surprisingly strong action considering there’s no way that could hold up in court…right?

nickvec4• 3 months ago

This may be one of the most unethical decisions I have ever seen a company make in recent years (disregarding fraud and the like.)

mvandermeulen• 3 months ago

Ever != recent years

nickvec4• 3 months ago

"ever" - used for emphasis in questions and other remarks, expressing astonishment or outrage.

"who ever heard of a grown man being frightened of the dark?"

HelloMcFly• 3 months ago

This is the kind of comment that you just really, truly do not need to make. Ever.

jasomill• 3 months ago

This sounds like a sensible policy for Meta and the basis for a good argument against media consolidation for everyone else.

Win win.

abhinaystha• 3 months ago

Really?

rambojohnson• 3 months ago

Why wouldn't they.

giannicmptr1000• 3 months ago

i haven't looked at the site in a decade, strange people still like that slop

ButlerianJihad• 3 months ago

The really hilarious thing about Gmail is: there have been at least two class-action lawsuit announcements, that are totally legitimate from the legit senders, regarding a settlement with Google in some regard. Each of the messages has been duly sent directly to my spambox on Gmail.

It would seem that Google and Gmail have a distinct COI in regards to delivering messages about these lawsuits to their victims/plaintiffs.

It is like the USPS losing a lawsuit and "losing" your mail about it...

Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

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