Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

https://www.the-independent.com/tech/mark-zuckerberg-meta-fine-trillion-b3010281.html

by wrxd • 15 days ago

170 185 15 days ago

the-independent.com

the_real_cher• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days 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• 15 days ago

I 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.

iAMkenough2• 15 days ago

Alcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.

cwmoore3• 15 days ago

See the 18th and 21st Amendments to the US Constitution.

topgrain2• 15 days ago

I’m pretty sure all the benefits of social media exist in aspects other than the engagement-driven “algo” feed.

HappySweeney• 15 days ago

this 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

Suzuran• 15 days ago

...probably with a referral string that results in them getting paid, too.

wrxd• 15 days ago

This is why you should install an ad blocker

matterhorn2000• 15 days ago

Question is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.

rafterydj• 15 days ago

If 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?

solumunus• 15 days ago

Because that is how the law operates.

andsoitis• 15 days ago

Are 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.

ozgrakkurt• 15 days ago

This is more of a learning question. I recommend reading why law exists in the first place

stronglikedan• 15 days ago

because sometimes what everyone thinks they know is wrong, and law is extremely nuanced, so everyone deserves a chance to defend themselves

rg2004• 15 days ago

Feels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.

amelius• 15 days ago

... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.

kridsdale13• 15 days ago

Here I am.

pier25• 15 days ago

Social media is the new tobacco

CJefferson2• 15 days ago

From the article there's this. If this isn't proof, well, I don't know what would be:

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.”

villish• 15 days ago

I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?

api• 15 days ago

All of it is addiction engineered.

Grombobulous3• 15 days ago

One lawsuit existing isn’t mutually exclusive to another one being filed, of course.

Gualdrapo• 15 days ago

As 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-ho...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...

nashashmi• 15 days ago

Tiktok US is now participating in suppressing genocide news. Facebook doesn’t allow to follow Palestine interests

ceejayoz4• 15 days ago

They'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-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.

Jedd• 15 days ago

What do you mean 'what about' ?

Is your suggestion this case is somehow spurious because there aren't equal cases against everyone else clearly guilty of this manipulation?

In any case, as per TFA, the claim is:

[intent to] addict young users

jerf• 15 days ago

I don't know what those four state's goals are, but if they are out to address the nominal issue and not just collect a payday in court from deep pockets, they are correct to not sue all of them all at once. In our system, they want a precedent. To get that precedent, they go after their best target to get it. I would expect they looked at all the possible targets and determined that Facebook is the one they are most likely to win.

They have to make this determination before discovery, but that's life.

If they win this case, even if they don't get the full penalty, you can be sure the other companies will be paying attention and will do something about it. Of course that "something" may not be "immediately stop engineering addiction into their products" and be more like "be sure to obfuscate it better, maybe crank the knob down a bit and prepare to claim in a future lawsuit that the problem was solved even though they haven't really changed anything". Suing the next company is easier with a precedent to go off of.

They are correct to concentrate their fire on what they believe is the most vulnerable part of the line, not to spread their limited resources out over attacking half-a-dozen of the largest and most well-resourced targets on Earth. Once they lose the first case, the resulting precedent weakens them in all of the others as well.

sscaryterry2• 15 days ago

Let Meta set the precedent, then the other will follow...

dlcarrier• 15 days ago

What traditional media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged? The local broadcast news makes you watch for half an hour to an hour, with a quarter of the time being ads, plus more sponsored segments, constantly teasing the headline news subject, which could have been a 100-word article. They take half a page of printed news and draw it out as long as they can, trying to bait you the whole time. YouTube channels' clickbait titles and thumbnails have nothing on them.

bluefirebrand3• 15 days ago

Trying to keep people engaged on your 30 minute long news segment is a lot different than trying to keep them engaged every free waking moment they have

robin_reala3• 13 days ago

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

Why shouldn’t the Meta precedent also apply to them afterwards?

josefritzishere• 15 days ago

TBH, I think this should be prosecuted as a felony. In the past, fines have not proven to motivate Meta to change.

notyourwork2• 15 days ago

Seems 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.

nradov2• 15 days ago

Which 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.

kridsdale13• 15 days ago

“Harm” to be found is the job of the trial.

specialist2• 15 days ago

As 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.

ceejayoz4• 15 days ago

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.

TheOtherHobbes2• 15 days ago

Potentially wire fraud, RICO, securities fraud, perjury/obstruction, and reckless endangerment.

Of course the bar for a criminal conviction would be much higher, but the vulnerabilities are certainly there.

specialist2• 15 days ago

Yes and: Given social media's scope and impact, felony seems inadequate. Something "crimes against humanity" scale is more appropriate. With real consequences.

As with tobacco, social media target all children. Not just these plantiffs in MS.

The tobacco settlements in the USA didn't protect the rest of the world. Further, the purveyors just pivoted.

davedx• 15 days ago

Some useful context in here: 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

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.”

notyourwork2• 15 days ago

Scary and utter chilling to read. Reminds me of the Firestone scandal in some ways but likely with far reaching worse consequences for society.

kingleopold• 15 days ago

fun fact: lots of smart META teams knew it too and they went it with because ethics can be bought. Stock perf. and TOC bought them along the way so they can exit/retire.

Corporations are evil but teams that work there are even more evil than them. Because they are also part of the decision makers, not just CEO.

ozozozd• 15 days ago

This comment was a scary read. I might add it ruined my evening.

I wasn’t aware that they were so deliberately targeting (attacking?) teens.

Grombobulous3• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

$423 billion*

zerobees• 15 days ago

Meta 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.

Grombobulous3• 15 days ago

Yeah, 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.

imglorp2• 15 days ago

Meta 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.

rf15• 15 days ago

What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.

imglorp2• 15 days ago

Sort 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.

intended4• 15 days ago

Yes 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.

baggachipz2• 15 days 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.

dijit• 15 days ago

"You are not immune to propaganda" is a phrase that doesn't hit hard enough.

It applies to you dear reader, yes you, not u/baggachipz.. YOU.

I am also not immune, I believe myself to be, constantly. My worldview is truth and I am "open to other ideas"- yet I have very obviously anchored myself to things the first time I hear of them, despite actively making steps to try to see all angles and explain away facts with alternative theories. (which is exhausting) I definitely believe what someone wants me to believe.

It's plain, it's obvious, and yet it continually happens. It's only with a decade of distance that I even realise what had happened.

And people call me "balanced" and "intelligent", theoretically I have more tools to deal with this than the majority of the population.

Yet... I am not immune to propaganda.

etcimon• 15 days ago

All those software turds getting liquidated and replaced by open source would be the best thing for humanity altogether

jhickok• 15 days ago

Assuming we eek thru a whirlwind of catastrophic dangers, one day we will look at this period of time with the same reaction as if we had been sprinkling lead on our cereal.

austin-cheney4• 15 days ago

In all fairness social media is in the same kind of business model as porn and gambling. None of that is forced on anybody. If you don't want those in your life then just don't consume them. If you don't want them in your household use a DNS blocker. How much should we really parent the rest of society?

edwcross2• 15 days ago

Law forbids my local administrative entities from engaging with porn and gambling. Yet they force me to use Facebook if I want to see events that are happening (and paid with my taxes).

So, sorry, but the liberal ideal paradise of "let loose and people will choose" does not work in practice, at least where I live. I need some laws to force my less tech-savvy nearby citizens to make the right choices.

CJefferson2• 15 days ago

Because most people can't set up a DNS blocker. There are lots of things we, as a society, decide we want to ban. I think social media is closer to illegal drugs.

We don't need to let multi-billion dollar companies maximise profits while ruining people's lives. We can just decide to ban them, as a society.

TheOtherHobbes2• 15 days ago

Facebook chose that business model. It wasn't forced on it.

The terrible thing about social media is that has real utility. If you take away the addictive optimisation and surveillance and leave the local networking, forums, discussion groups, and small sales and basic ads you still have a very viable business - somewhat smaller, but still wildly successful.

But the point of Facebook is surveillance and belief/behaviour modification. The services provided are secondary.

ryandvm• 15 days ago

It's a fair question, but it irritates me because it suggests that we should accept the self-destruction of vast swaths of the population in the name of perfect liberty.

The reality is that we have a lot of institutions that prey on consumers' biology in a way that is overpowering for the average individual. Social media, ragebait news, and junk food are good examples of legal products that hijack human tendencies for the purpose of commercial exploitation.

We do not allow unrestricted access to opiates because the average person does not have the fortitude required to resist addiction. It's becoming increasingly clear that some of these media products are able to induce drug-like dependency - and harm.

Fortunately, for the media products, I think the answer is fairly obvious. Sitting at the bottom of all this is advertising. Meta needs people looking at their screens 6 hours a day because they don't make money from subscriptions, they make their money per-view from the advertisers. FOX News or MSNBC are the same, if you're not holding your iPad with white knuckles wondering how democracy is going to end, they're not making money.

tempodox• 15 days ago

Sure, let your kids buy alcohol, cocaine and heroin in every shop there is. Then see how much it helps that you ban those at home.

ben_w2• 15 days ago

If you don't want those in your life then just don't consume them.

That works fine when the thing is neither addictive nor required for interaction with certain people you need to interact with.

I can avoid Meta specifically, but then again I also live in Germany and one of the language podcasts I listen to had the host complain about their bank telling them to communicate by fax next time they wanted to change their PIN.

wseqyrku• 15 days ago

Large corporations behave very much like a typical dictatorship anywhere in the world. And I mean they are playing the exact same playbook as much as they can. Actually sometimes I don't know which one borrowed from the other. The latter is definitionally the ultimate monopoly, which looks like the annual target for those corporations.

kridsdale13• 15 days ago

I worked in the team at Facebook (2017-2019) relevant to this stuff. I saw (did not write) some of the documents cited.

The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people, working very hard all the time to steer the ship away from harm to normal people and toward establishing healthy relationships and media diet.

We were consistently undermined and overruled by the Directors and Executives. Many health and safety boosting projects (with evidence) were cancelled or turned backwards to maximize harm, because it correlated with revenue or “Time Spent” or “Sessions”, which I guess their equity was based on.

Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

throwaw12• 15 days ago

But you can't sue individuals in this case.

They will say: I had this metric to increase shareholder value, I tuned it, that's it, no one stopped me or told me not to do it.

US just needs different laws

AlexandrB4• 15 days ago

The old adage applies to social media: "the medium is the message". You can't steer a ship whose whole purpose is crashing into icebergs from crashing into an iceberg. You're working against the whole purpose of the thing itself. Even if these engineers are Facebook were successful another, less idealistic, social media company would pick up the slack of promoting the clickbaitiest most sensationalistic content possible. We already saw this happen with the meteoric rise of TikTok.

I don't know what the solution is, but the incentives created by the combination of algorithmic feeds and how lucrative internet "fame" can be consistently encourages the worst kind of content.

cryo32• 15 days ago

If you can't make the board do good or hold them to account when they do bad things, you should leave.

No leadership position can function without enough resources to do their bidding.

And yes, I have done that.

afavour2• 15 days ago

The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people

Then why didn't they quit?

I believe I could have gotten a job at Meta (and hey, maybe I'm wrong!) but I've never been able to stomach the idea of working on their products. If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?

And look, I get it. If they didn't make it some other engineer would. There's no union or anything that would make resisting it a meaningful cause. But that doesn't mean everyone can absolve themselves of any culpability. They took the (big pile of) money, they did the work.

RetroTechie2• 15 days ago

Those leaders own full responsibility for this.

Sorry, no free pass.

No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users.

Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.

xorcist• 15 days ago

engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people,

No. I'm sorry. You are not allowed to say this. Our society is post-truth enough as it is.

This is a company founded on a singular idea: Lock up as much as the free web as possible behind their login and own as much of the information as possible. Every type of web service on the open web, from forums to classifieds to event booking to blogs and social media, and of course games early on, has been reimplemented on their platform.

Every single person working on maximizing "engagement" or whatever you call it these days knows exactly what they are doing.

Sure, do your thing. Take over what parts of the web you can. Take on the metaverse. We live in a market economy and you are free to do this. But not for a second are you allowed to talk about morals or doing good "from the inside". This is not the responsibility of senior executives alone. That is simply too much.

This is a company where everyone knew an actual genocide was coordinated using their platform, and they did absolutely nothing to stop it, despite the efforts from Amnesty and outside journalists to raise attention to it. There must be a limit to how much spin you can put on it.

slibhb2• 15 days ago

Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.

Then their parents shouldn't let them use the internet.

I find it interesting that so much of how people think about morality involves attributing free will unevenly. I.e. "facebook execs" are using their free will to addict people but those people have no ability to resist. It's so obviously corrosive to think something like "only evil people have free will; good people are just hapless victims".

KyleTheDev• 15 days ago

I don't really see how this applies in the specific thread? I understand your overall point, and I agree. But, here, we're talking about individuals pushing a company & its' employees towards creating what can be considered poison. They themselves would not be immune to their poison, and I'd wager plenty of them are probably equally addicted to their devices. Children will also be susceptible, and potentially more-so due to their developing brains.

I don't really see how this scenario is an uneven attribution of morality.

inigyou4• 15 days ago

What do you think it's like to be a child when all your friends have InstaTok and you don't?

gmerc• 15 days ago

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

brk• 15 days ago

While 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• 15 days ago

That'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.

BizarroLand• 15 days ago

I feel like if you know that the previous company was executed for its crimes, its property auctioned off to the highest bidder, and its managers and executives thrown in prison, that THAT would have a chilling effect on other companies that might follow in their footsteps.

s1artibartfast• 13 days ago

The "corporations are people" argument is better understood as "corporations are made of people".

The analog of people not losing speech when speaking through a corporation would be persecution for criminal acts while working for one.

This absolutely exists already. The challenge is finding a law that was broken.

kmeisthax• 15 days ago

I originally had a thing about "piercing the corporate veil" written, but after some consultation with Google's shit AI[0], it told me about the legal writ of "quo warranto"[1], which was apparently used as legal proceedings in the US to argue for the dissolution of a company.

So, in other words, we have a corporate death penalty, it just has a weird name, is mired in a bunch of weirdly English legal history, and it isn't very well used[2]. Also, the motion for the writ would have to be filed by Delaware's AG specifically.

Also, also, this is a nuclear option.

The primary hurdle of filing a quo warranto lawsuit against Facebook would be political, not procedural: Texas would really, really like to replace Delaware as the default state large enterprises incorporate in[3]. In fact, this process is already happening. Delaware made the mistake of enforcing their shareholder protection laws against Elon Musk's pay packet, so Texas is promising corporations a jurisdiction where shareholders donate their capital to the company for absolutely nothing in return except a token that they can pump the value of. In other words, Texas is a rotten borough that is stripping away all the ability for minority stakeholders to sue.

So if Delaware actually moves to revoke Facebook[4]'s charter, that might scare every other corporation out of Delaware - including the ones that aren't obvious scams. There's probably some way Delaware could hold existing corporations hostage there, but that would be an even more thermonuclear option.

That being said, I'm starting to wonder if the concept of a "nuclear option" is even meaningful in a world where "correctly deciding a shareholder rights case" destroys your reputation as a fair and neutral arbiter of those rights. Why bother keeping your powder dry if it's evaporating anyway? Go out with a bang and kill Facebook.

[0] Which if Google hadn't enshittified their traditional search index, I wouldn't have to use this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_warranto#United_States

[2] One may argue that the state doesn't use this very often because rapacious corporations happen to be useful to rapacious nation-states.

[3] Confusingly, they're calling this "DExit", which is annoying because we already use "Dexit" to refer to Pokemon Sword and Shield not shipping with all the Pokemon in it.

[4] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

robin_reala3• 13 days ago

On [0], you don’t have to use Google. There are plenty of other better options these days.

chneu• 15 days ago

The US used to pull business charters all the time. It was a common place thing before the world wars.

jm42• 15 days ago

That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives.

Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.

IAmBroom• 15 days ago

A true acolyte of the Church of Too Big To Fail speaks up...

suttontom• 15 days ago

I don't think the poster meant applying the death penalty to the corporation.

cyanydeez• 15 days ago

far greater consequences to let business become the defacto unelected government.

ben_w2• 13 days ago

but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis.

I don't think it would cause that much damage. If I understand right about floats and stuff, Meta is 2.13% of the S&P500, so NVIDIA (8%) could sneeze and cause more fallout to pension plans and so on than deleting Meta entirely. A sudden worldwide loss of access to content on Meta's servers would cause more secondary fallout than what happens to the markets.

But if forcibly dis-incorporating Meta did cause such market fallout, there's always this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837

93po• 15 days ago

I'd settle for corporate jail time. No more profiting off illegal activity when the fine is less than profit. Nope, corporate jail. All operations have to stop for your sentence. No sales, no product development, no operations. Maybe an outside team of accountants can be allowed to run your books. This would effectively be a death sentence for many companies, but at least it mirrors the experience humans have to endure - loss of job, family loss of income, loss of ability to get future employment, etc.

kermatt• 14 days ago

Real jail time for corporate officers.

Currently there is no downside for sociopathic behavior. Employment contracts guarantee they earn if the stock does well. If not they get a golden parachute on the way out.

If those that ran the company were actually responsible for what the company does, then this shit would not happen.

JumpCrisscross• 15 days ago

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare

No. That's a bail-out for Meta. Just assess massive fines. That sidesteps the legal novelty of a "corporate death penalty," together with the fact that just revoking a charter doesn't actually do anything for assets. (Corporate death penalties done right are fines with extra steps. There are many more ways to do it wrong, e.g. thinking revoking a corporate charter means anything.)

The only people who should be arguing for a corporate death penalty right now are Meta's lawyers to distract from the possibility of the real penalty: massive fines.

bigfatkitten• 13 days ago

Chain of responsibility legislation that puts individuals in prison for their part would be an excellent start.

sscaryterry2• 15 days ago

Couldn't happen to a nicer person.

giwook• 15 days ago

Unfortunately, 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.

intended4• 15 days ago

This 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.

NickC254• 15 days ago

You'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.

_fat_santa• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

I 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.

bluefirebrand3• 15 days 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

Havoc• 15 days ago

He could just swing by the whitehouse with a donation to make this go away. That seems to be the way now

daveidol• 15 days ago

Hasn’t that always been the way? A little Super PAC and some lobbying to grease the wheels

9999000009994• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

I'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• 15 days ago

How do you trust advertisements? Do you do your own research after?

inigyou4• 15 days ago

Doesn't that creep you out?

sebastiennight• 15 days 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.

9999000009994• 15 days ago

How 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.

NickC254• 15 days ago

If you need Instagram ads to tell you which VSTs to buy, you haven't:

1. spent enough time on KVR or Gearslutz, discussing with other musicians, hobbyists, plugin nerds and developers who are building and battle testing these plugins.

2. spent enough time making music....which is why you spend money on VSTs to begin with.

3. spent time learning to build your own plugins or VCV Rack modules.

4. watched YT videos made by your favorite producers telling you which ones they use, so you can get it, and then use it to make music. the idea is "hey if its good enough for (insert artists here), it's good enough for me". You wouldn't buy a plugin just to have it, especially when some of these plugins cost hundreds of dollars - you'd buy it to use it.

If you need to use instagram to tell you where concerts are, fine. But as a heads up, Youtube does this too! And it does so in a way that directly supports the artist. AFAIK Instagram doesn't pay artists for their content.

9999000009994• 15 days ago

I don’t solely rely on Instagram for this. My more expensive VSTs, the complete Korg Collection, I purchased after owning Korg Gadget for a while.

But if I see something cool for 20$ on instagram, why not?

3. spent time learning to build your own plugins or VCV Rack modules.

I don’t like C++ or other low level programming languages.

I guess I could now vibe code something, but then the comments would chastise me for that.

I probably do have enough VSTs at this point to sit down and actually finish a project. But ehh.

I think advertising can be ethical. It just needs to be honest.

insane_dreamer• 15 days ago

awesome, you can opt in to the ads while the rest of us get to opt out

jmyeet• 15 days ago

I 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• 15 days ago

Meta 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.

inigyou4• 15 days ago

Facebook was originally an NSA project called Lifelog but the NSA couldn't figure out how to make people sign up

alex1138• 7 days ago

Which 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

eli2• 15 days ago

These 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.

intended4• 15 days ago

They 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.

eli2• 14 days ago

I 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?

blaqq2• 15 days ago

I wonder exactly where everything kind of went south for Mark and his platform, or was this always the goal since Facebook's inception

AlexandrB4• 15 days ago

It 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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 15 days ago

Arguably, 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• 15 days ago

A 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• 15 days ago

I 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?

slibhb2• 15 days ago

We 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.

bryan_w• 15 days ago

Indeed 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• 15 days ago

This 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• 15 days ago

do 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• 15 days ago

Someone 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• 15 days ago

  AfD 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• 15 days ago

It 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• 15 days ago

But 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• 15 days ago

They could pay this off in like 1-6 months I imagine

zombot• 15 days ago

One 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.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 15 days ago

Here 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.41...

tim333• 14 days ago

I 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• 10 days ago

I wonder how much Mark will give Donnie to make this all go away?

Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

Related Stories