Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/meta-loses-bid-dismiss-us-states-claims-that-facebook-instagram-addict-children-2026-06-30/

by tartoran • 21 days ago

174 79 21 days ago

reuters.com

josefritzishere2• 21 days ago

This is an area where we really could use case law to protect kids from the Zuckerberg's of the world. It's important for the future. We're not going to "self-regulate" our way out of this.

whynotmaybe2• 21 days ago

Is there a place where self-regulation ever works?

zach_miller• 21 days ago

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

I think this is a fun historical example. Ships passing through Denmark needed to pay a tax of 1-2% of the value of their cargo. They self-assessed that value.

The twist that makes it interesting was that the King could choose to purchase any cargo immediately at the reported value. If a ship underreported, they might save on tax, but they risked taking a hefty loss.

I have no idea how effective this was, but it's compelling. I wonder whether great self-regulation might need clever design like that example.

Bratmon5• 21 days ago

The best I've seen is ESRB ratings on video games.

josefritzishere2• 21 days ago

Very few. But it's the core of our current economic system... which explains a lot of the problems.

_doctor_love• 21 days ago

The dive industry, when I got my PADI one of the instructors told me diving is mainly self-regulated.

okuntilnow3• 21 days ago

But when governments do regulate (UK, AUS etc all) - people cry foul.

kelseyfrog• 21 days ago

People cry foul about every other thing too. It's best to ignore them.

toofy2• 21 days ago

i agree with the sibling comment here. someone in a comment section somewhere is crying foul about everything.

morkalork• 21 days ago

Because the implementation is a shit show?

consumer4512• 21 days ago

The entire age verification push in AUS was started by an advertising consulting company to distract from proposed online gambling regulation.

Protecting children is a noble goal that I personally agree with, but it's also often used to sane-wash further erosion of privacy.

As has been discussed here and elsewhere, age verification turns out to be the complete loss of Internet anonymity due to its implementation techniques. There are proposed alternative implementations, very conveniently for some, this is not part of the discussion.

This is exactly the time when nerds like us should speak up.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/safety-secu...

snickerbockers3• 21 days ago

This actualy came up in yesterday's congressional MKULTRA hearing. Somebody at the hearing pointed out the absurdity of the CIA claiming that MKULTRA was a dead end when we have 20 years of social media scandals and lawsuits showing that social media corporations are intentionally creating products that can manipulate large groups of people on an individual level. Clearly the hypotheses the CIA was testing were not all wrong so the mere existence of Facebook, reddit, etc seem to point to the CIA lying on some level about their research.

There's no hard evidence that Facebook et al are a direct continuation of the MKULTRA program but even if they aren't it should be very concerning that they are deploying similar techniques on a planetary scale.

ButlerianJihad• 21 days ago

MKULTRA
There's no hard evidence

There are thousands of manchildren living in moms' basements, with corkboards festooned with scraps of photographs that are connected by colored yarn and pushpins, and they would all vehemently argue to the contrary!

cyanydeez4• 21 days ago

MKULTRA was about using _drugs_ to alter state. It has literally zero other than pop culture memes and conspiracy theory in relation to what facebook is doing.

The facts are basically: Facebook's own researchers and independent researchers presented real harms caused by Facebook's algorithms, and they fired them, ignored them and took the datasets away and continued doing as they want.

You don't need to go to any conspiracy anything; that just makes the claims sound crazy aby unnecesary ssociation.

Bratmon5• 21 days ago

Honestly, I'm about 10% of the way towards "Meta's social media people wrote this comment and astroturfed it to the top so that the case against Meta looks crazy."

jerrythegerbil• 21 days ago

MKULTRA was about using drugs to alter state and produce uninhibited truthfulness.

Social media has a direct impact on dopamine and uninhibited oversharing.

The mechanism isn’t even ambiguous, which is exactly why there’s a case, about the production of a deliberately addictive substance. The chemicals and effects differ, but it’s deliberate use and production as the same exact means to an end do not.

There’s zero ambiguity here of the alignment on an end goal.

Side note: is META hiring and can you refer me?

bobmcnamara• 21 days ago

That sounds like something somebody hopped up on social media would say.

snickerbockers3• 21 days ago

Nice fedslop but teddy k was never given any drugs.

Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.

hparadiz3• 21 days ago

Seriously losing confidence in the American judicial system with rulings like this. Facebook is already blocking children below age 13 and now with social media bans in place in many states the cut off is now 16. So frankly rulings like this just seem like the government seeing dollar signs and asking for hand outs. And all because people apparently can't accept any personal responsibility.

Disclaimer: I do not have a FB account.

wry_discontent• 21 days ago

This seems totally reasonable. It is designed to be addictive, and they definitely target folks under 18. The article specifically mentions teens.

hparadiz3• 21 days ago

You still haven't convinced me that is inherently bad that is warrants some sort of monetary damages. All entertainment is addictive. That's the whole point.

This is just people seeing dollar signs asking for handouts. Nothing of an real value to society. Why is it okay for FB to be sued but not say Pokemon? I think Pokemon is way more dangerous, addictive, and is basically gambling with the card packs.

Have some personal responsibility for once.

expedition32• 21 days ago

Society won't collapse if we ban kids from social media.

Sure some tech bros won't get their Lambos but I can live with that.

kmeisthax• 21 days ago

"Personal responsibility" stops working when all your friends and family have a Facebook[0] account and you want to contact them. Facebook builds their platforms like roach motels - easy to get in, hard to get out of - and uses your friends to hold you hostage on the platform.

My personal preference would be laws to restrict ad surveillance and laws to mandate third-party interoperability to break that calculus. But absent that, I'll take massive damage awards from the legal system.

[0] Or Instagram, or Whatsapp, or...

alex11382• 21 days ago

Literally hard to get out of beyond network effects, too. Talk about GDPR all you like but I know of at least one person whose account got reactivated after deleting it and then promptly showed up on People You May Know

This is fraud. Promising something you didn't deliver is fraud

everdrive3• 21 days ago

Large groups of people just don't know how to solve these sorts of problems. A government will never say "facebook should either not exist or should radically modify its product so that it is no longer successful" At best, they will push for identity verification or age verification.

These are not the only two possible courses, but these will be the choices put in front of us. Get used to reading books and going on walks. The internet is almost dead.

Zigurd2• 21 days ago

The government regulates plenty of complex products and markets. Software isn't that special.

datsci_est_20153• 21 days ago

The trick is to cut away at the user-hostile foundations of the product. In theory, a product like Facebook or Instagram would have no need to be regulated, but the sale of user data, the engineered addictiveness (looking at you “Data Scientists”), etc. are all worthy of being regulated.

Towaway69• 21 days ago

Third option: Facebook changes it's business model from data gathering and selling to pay-to-use. Make Insta and FB both be gate communities where folks have to pay to post.

Fourth option: product becomes less addictive and the algorithms stop optimising on "angry users click more". Less advertising profits, perhaps less engagement but probably still profits on advertising.

Fifth option: don't aim to continually increase profits and instead change the rules of capitalism to be less focused on making "profit at any price" to perhaps a more gentler form. After all, Monopoly(TM) is restarted once one player has all the money, it's about time that we do that in real life too or how many more trillionaires do we need?

So there are also grey choices here and not only b/w.

everdrive3• 21 days ago

That was my point. Intelligent people on HN can find other options, but none of those other options will either impress Meta shareholders nor will they make it into legislation.

thinkingtoilet2• 21 days ago

Get used to reading books and going on walks.

As someone who does both, it's quite lovely! You might even be happier doing that than whatever it is the modern internet has become.

everdrive3• 21 days ago

Agreed. I'm working on the transition. I'm still a work in progress.

plagiarist2• 21 days ago

It would probably improve my life that the internet dies, except there are no longer many third spaces. Those spaces that do exist are also recording my every movement anyway. As is my privately-owned vehicle that I took to get there.

atmavatar• 21 days ago

It seems a relatively simple first step should be to declare that algorithmic feeds which cater content to individuals render the platform a publisher and thus no longer subject to section 230 protections.

glaslong• 21 days ago

at least until Flock reports that you're reading a book you bought 2nd hand, and Amazon shuts down your AWS account for the audacity.

alex11382• 21 days ago

Addiction has a lot of definitions one can split hairs over but I note the following

The feeds are and have been for years highly random (at least one anecdote of two people who were 'married' - relationship status - on FB yet none saw the others' posts)

If you don't go on FB they really don't like it and they spam you to death

Can Zuck meaningfully claim they're not in the business of addiction, whatever else? No. His life philosophy is "dumb fucks"

Edit: Oh, and People You May know. Now everyone can friend you and you have 2000 friends... none of whose posts you'll ever see. And the psychological baggage. Is the cute girl I like looking at my profile and that's why they're on there, or is it shamelessly pulled from geolocation data?

intended• 21 days ago

These are the types of cases that shed light on the desire for age verification.

mullingitover• 21 days ago

The obvious answer to this mess is probably a simple engagement tax.

Companies like Facebook and Tiktok are incentivized to behaviorally modify their users in a way that's harmful to society: they make more money the longer everyone in society has their face glued to a phone. They'd be thrilled and printing money as society collapsed into every person staring into a slab of glass 20 plus hours per day.

Tax that time directly so it's no longer profitable to glue everyone to their phone.

sgnelson• 21 days ago

I was going to ask "at what point do people who work for Google and Meta ask themselves "Are we the baddies?"" But who am I kidding, as long as you're all making the big bucks for sitting at a computer, you'll continue to see this as harmless behavior that people are just upset about for no particular reason.

As someone who grew up as OG (original geek), it's now amazing to look around and see that technology seems to be having an ever more negative impact on my everyday life.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 21 days ago

Sometimes there are HN comment complaining about articles reporting on legal proceedings that fail to include URLs pointing to the documents referenced. No complaints in this thread so far

Here is the order denying Meta's motion to dismiss

https://ia803204.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...

Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

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