9 ms·

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

170 points by wrxd 2mo ago

tim333 2mo 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 2mo ago
I wonder how much Mark will give Donnie to make this all go away?
the_real_cher 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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.
- iAMkenough 2mo ago
  Alcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    See the 18th and 21st Amendments to the US Constitution.
    - iAMkenough 2mo ago
      Yes, the 21st Amendment is democratic society accepting the negatives despite the limited positives.
      - cwmoore 2mo ago
        I was musing earlier today that in US culture you must have a liquor license to sell alcohol, but a drivers license to purchase it.
- topgrain2 2mo ago
  I’m pretty sure all the benefits of social media exist in aspects other than the engagement-driven “algo” feed.
HappySweeney 2mo 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 2mo ago
  ...probably with a referral string that results in them getting paid, too.
- wrxd 2mo ago
  This is why you should install an ad blocker
matterhorn2000 2mo 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.
- rg2004 2mo ago
  Feels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.
  - amelius 2mo ago
    ... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.
    - ceejayoz 2mo ago
      Has to be a pretty decent sized fraction. https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-program https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro... > The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
      - nradov 2mo ago
        This case isn't an SEC enforcement action.
        ceejayoz 2mo ago
        I'm aware. Start one.
  - kridsdale1 2mo ago
    Here I am.
- rafterydj 2mo ago
villish 2mo ago
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
- robin_reala 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism Why shouldn’t the Meta precedent also apply to them afterwards?
- api 2mo ago
  All of it is addiction engineered.
- Grombobulous 2mo ago
  One lawsuit existing isn’t mutually exclusive to another one being filed, of course.
- Gualdrapo 2mo 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-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
  - nashashmi 2mo ago
    Tiktok US is now participating in suppressing genocide news. Facebook doesn’t allow to follow Palestine interests
- ceejayoz 2mo 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-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299 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.
josefritzishere 2mo ago
TBH, I think this should be prosecuted as a felony. In the past, fines have not proven to motivate Meta to change.
- notyourwork 2mo 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.
- nradov 2mo 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.
  - kridsdale1 2mo ago
    “Harm” to be found is the job of the trial.
    - cwmoore 2mo ago
      I don’t think harm is a legal standard.
  - specialist 2mo 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.
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-9/chapter-2/section-273a/ 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.
davedx 2mo ago
Some useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Meta-suit-summary.pdf 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 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.” 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.”
- notyourwork 2mo 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 2mo ago
Grombobulous 2mo 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 2mo ago
  $423 billion*
- zerobees 2mo 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.
  - Grombobulous 2mo 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.
imglorp 2mo 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 2mo ago
  What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.
  - imglorp 2mo 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.
  - intended 2mo 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.
- baggachipz 2mo 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.
gmerc 2mo ago
Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
- JumpCrisscross 2mo 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 2mo ago
  Chain of responsibility legislation that puts individuals in prison for their part would be an excellent start.
- brk 2mo 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.
  - s1artibartfast 2mo 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.
  - tremon 2mo ago
sscaryterry 2mo ago
Couldn't happen to a nicer person.
giwook 2mo 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.
- intended 2mo 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.
- NickC25 2mo 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.
- deleted 2mo ago
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- deleted 2mo ago
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_fat_santa 2mo 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 2mo 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.
- bluefirebrand 2mo 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 2mo ago
He could just swing by the whitehouse with a donation to make this go away. That seems to be the way now
- daveidol 2mo ago
  Hasn’t that always been the way? A little Super PAC and some lobbying to grease the wheels
999900000999 2mo 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 2mo 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.)
  - inigyou 2mo ago
    Doesn't that creep you out?
  - Synthetic7346 2mo ago
    How do you trust advertisements? Do you do your own research after?
- sebastiennight 2mo 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.
  - 999900000999 2mo 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.
jmyeet 2mo 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 2mo 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.
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Facebook was originally an NSA project called Lifelog but the NSA couldn't figure out how to make people sign up
  - alex1138 2mo 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
eli 2mo 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.
- intended 2mo 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.
  - eli 2mo 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?
    - intended 2mo ago
      I think your question needed to be discussed 10 years ago. I don’t know the answer to your example, but I would very much like to know what the canonical answer is, and what the pros and cons are. It’s not a topic that gets as much attention, even here on HN.
blaqq2 2mo 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
- AlexandrB 2mo 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.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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?
slibhb 2mo 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.
- entech 2mo 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.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- bryan_w 2mo 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
upmind 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago
They could pay this off in like 1-6 months I imagine
zombot 2mo 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo 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.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...

170 points by wrxd 2mo 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 2mo ago

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

the_real_cher 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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.
iAMkenough 2mo ago
Alcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.
- cwmoore 2mo ago
  See the 18th and 21st Amendments to the US Constitution.
  - iAMkenough 2mo ago
    Yes, the 21st Amendment is democratic society accepting the negatives despite the limited positives.
    - cwmoore 2mo ago
      I was musing earlier today that in US culture you must have a liquor license to sell alcohol, but a drivers license to purchase it.
topgrain2 2mo ago
I’m pretty sure all the benefits of social media exist in aspects other than the engagement-driven “algo” feed.

HappySweeney 2mo 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 2mo ago
...probably with a referral string that results in them getting paid, too.
wrxd 2mo ago
This is why you should install an ad blocker

matterhorn2000 2mo 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.

rg2004 2mo ago
Feels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.
- amelius 2mo ago
  ... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.
  - ceejayoz 2mo ago
    Has to be a pretty decent sized fraction. https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-program https://www.sec.gov/enforcement-litigation/whistleblower-pro... > The Commission is authorized to provide monetary awards to eligible individuals who come forward with high-quality original information that leads to an SEC enforcement action in which over $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
    - nradov 2mo ago
      This case isn't an SEC enforcement action.
      - ceejayoz 2mo ago
        I'm aware. Start one.
- kridsdale1 2mo ago
  Here I am.
rafterydj 2mo ago

villish 2mo ago

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

robin_reala 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism Why shouldn’t the Meta precedent also apply to them afterwards?
api 2mo ago
All of it is addiction engineered.
Grombobulous 2mo ago
One lawsuit existing isn’t mutually exclusive to another one being filed, of course.
Gualdrapo 2mo 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-how-facebook-contributed-to-genocide-in-myanmar-and-why-it-will-not-be-held-accountable/ https://systemicjustice.org/article/facebook-and-genocide-ho... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook–Cambridge_Analytica_d...
- nashashmi 2mo ago
  Tiktok US is now participating in suppressing genocide news. Facebook doesn’t allow to follow Palestine interests
ceejayoz 2mo 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-settlement-social-media-addiction-trial-florida-teen-rcna352299 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.

josefritzishere 2mo ago

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

notyourwork 2mo 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.
nradov 2mo 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.
- kridsdale1 2mo ago
  “Harm” to be found is the job of the trial.
  - cwmoore 2mo ago
    I don’t think harm is a legal standard.
- specialist 2mo 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.
- ceejayoz 2mo ago
  https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-pen/part-1/title-9/chapter-2/section-273a/ 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.

davedx 2mo ago

Some useful context in here: https://attorneygenerallynnfitch.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Meta-suit-summary.pdf 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 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.” 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.”

notyourwork 2mo 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 2mo ago

Grombobulous 2mo 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 2mo ago
$423 billion*
zerobees 2mo 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.
- Grombobulous 2mo 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.

imglorp 2mo 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 2mo ago
What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.
- imglorp 2mo 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.
- intended 2mo 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.
baggachipz 2mo 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.

gmerc 2mo ago

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

JumpCrisscross 2mo 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 2mo ago
Chain of responsibility legislation that puts individuals in prison for their part would be an excellent start.
brk 2mo 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.
- s1artibartfast 2mo 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.
- tremon 2mo ago

sscaryterry 2mo ago

Couldn't happen to a nicer person.

giwook 2mo 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.

intended 2mo 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.
NickC25 2mo 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.
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_fat_santa 2mo 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 2mo 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.
bluefirebrand 2mo 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 2mo ago

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

daveidol 2mo ago
Hasn’t that always been the way? A little Super PAC and some lobbying to grease the wheels

999900000999 2mo 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 2mo 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.)
- inigyou 2mo ago
  Doesn't that creep you out?
- Synthetic7346 2mo ago
  How do you trust advertisements? Do you do your own research after?
sebastiennight 2mo 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.
- 999900000999 2mo 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.

jmyeet 2mo 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 2mo 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.

inigyou 2mo ago
Facebook was originally an NSA project called Lifelog but the NSA couldn't figure out how to make people sign up
- alex1138 2mo 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

eli 2mo 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.

intended 2mo 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.
- eli 2mo 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?
  - intended 2mo ago
    I think your question needed to be discussed 10 years ago. I don’t know the answer to your example, but I would very much like to know what the canonical answer is, and what the pros and cons are. It’s not a topic that gets as much attention, even here on HN.

blaqq2 2mo 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

AlexandrB 2mo 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.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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?

slibhb 2mo 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.

entech 2mo 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.
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bryan_w 2mo 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

upmind 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo 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 2mo ago

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

zombot 2mo 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.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo 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.419868/gov.uscourts.cand.419868.455.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.41...