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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you going to take away all of Zuckerberg's vast personal fortune, and all the other execs at Meta? What about all the folks who've wokred as engineer and product managers? Otherwise they're still making out like bandits.
The Sackler family ultimately had to pay $6.5b of ~$10b they took out of the Purdue Pharma in its last decade of control.
It'd be more than fair that Zuckerberg has to pay 65% of his personal wealth gained by preying on adolescent insecurities.
And anyone else who was in a leadership role at Meta.
The deterrent is not allowing "Oops, I created a bad social outcome, but I'm keeping the profit I made from it" to be a viable way of getting rich.
And at least plant some doubt in folks doing evil that retribution might claw back their wealth in the future.
1. Facebook knew its products were addictive.
2. They knew this addiction had negative effects on its users.
3. After knowing the above, they tried to make them more addictive to make more money.
$0'ing the shares would probably spread the punishment roughly proportionally with the harms they did. It's not a perfect solution (people who previously sold their equity would be missed), but better than most.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.”
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.
> 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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
I find my niche VSTs by being active in music production circles, as well as actively making (shitty) music.
I browse KVR, Gearslutz, Synthtopia, etc.. and if something catches my interest, i investigate.
When I make (awful noise) music, if I have a need for a type of effect or instrument, I will look one up, and try it out if it suits what I'm trying to do.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.
Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?
Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.
I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.
This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."
If someone is a professional programmer and wants to maintain a similar level of income, where do you propose they go? There are similar perverse incentives at every other big tech company. While I agree that it's certainly possible for someone to avoid working for big tech and horrible companies in general, it's not possible for everyone to do so. Framing things the way you have merely supports unproductively railing at individuals who have worked for big tech, while actually making it harder to critique the underlying structural incentives.
To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".
By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".
There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.
> This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."
No, both apply. I agree it doesn't help to take aim at lower-level employees. The Zuck & co at the helm, and underlying causes that produce a laser-focus on "shareholder value", are both better targets.
But Meta has many employees, including various levels of management. Each of them can discuss shaky-ethics decisions, organise, protest, or.. quit.
Just saying that every cog in the machinery carries some responsibility. Some more than others.
> 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.
>> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people
> Then why didn't they quit?
I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. The Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.
Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years.
> If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?
What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.
> I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc.
I can't disagree with that. But my point is more... own it, then.
OP's comment said the leaders are fully responsible. I argue the engineers are responsible too. If they made the decision they made because they don't want their family to leave the Bay Area then that's the decision they made: they put their family ahead of broader societal damage they're helping create. I might do the same for my family. But I wouldn't try to claim that I'm completely blameless in the scenario.
> Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.
I suppose I would counter with "but it isn't".
> What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid?
Again, I agree with what you're saying, every day involves some level of moral compromise. But the task I choose to dedicate most of my waking hours to, day in day out, is a little different from whether I buy free range eggs or not.
> They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out.
One thing I've gotten tired of as I've gotten older is self-righteous judgement like that, when directed at the rank-and-file.
Your assignment: carefully inspect your life, and enumerate all the things which you are "stained with the consequences, because [you] were [a] coward who took the easy way out." There are lots because you're a human living in the modern world. Then, before you join the peanut gallery to judge smoeone, remember that guy's like you.
Sure, judge leaders like Zuckerberg like that, the buck stops with him, and his lieutenants who support his vision, and associates with "fuck you" money. But regular folks who need a job who try to do the right thing within their scope but are overridden? Come on.
> ‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.
For things like murdering people and genocide. When you're talking about controversial/gray areas, where there is no crime or clear consensus on punishable immorality, then no.
Expand that concept too far, too zealously, and you might as well shoot everyone because everyone's guilty. The world ain't black and white.
Facebook’s algorithms have quite literally caused that. Nearly a decade ago. And haven’t much improved.
And is clearly (with many, many studies on the topic over a decade plus) behind the rise of right wing nationalism and the fraying social contract.
Zuck is very, very aware of this - as leaked emails show. He knows, but continues anyway, and anyone at Meta at this point who also doesn’t know is being willfully ignorant.
This is the ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer’ argument.
> 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.
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.
Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.
In years past, when corporations saw the writing on the wall, they would actually get together and propose a set of regulations that could live with and satisfy the public. Because we are well past that point, yes, the wrong things and the rights things will get shoved into whatever regulation is coming.
"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.
Sure, but lots of people are way more susceptible. Self-reflection is important here. The ability to question one's state and beliefs is the only tool to combat propaganda. Most people don't seem to do that; they parrot party lines and stay glued to their "news" networks.
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?
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.
> 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 alternative is excessive regulation. Sugar, especially fructose, is extremely destructive to the body and its more addictive than cocaine, but I don't see laws forbidding access to sugar. If you are that concerned with regulating people to death start with the greatest harms first and see just how far that goes.
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.
> 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.
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.
You are falsely conflating so many things. I highly doubt your local law prevents certain people from ever accessing porn or gambling, because its absurd to enforce. More likely is that they forbid use of employer information system to access vices, which is fine.
Secondly, your local municipality isn't forcing you to access Facebook just because they put some content there.
Third, if you feel that strongly about this then go to your city counsel and demand they put their content somewhere else.
A decade ago official entities like police or city hall would say "Follow us on Twitter to get the latest news", and would just use it as an instant publication platform (well it's what it was designed for)...
Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news!
As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.”
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.
Scary and utter chilling to read. Reminds me of the Firestone scandal in some ways but likely with far reaching worse consequences for society.
Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
The US used to pull business charters all the time. It was a common place thing before the world wars.
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.
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.
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.
Are you going to take away all of Zuckerberg's vast personal fortune, and all the other execs at Meta? What about all the folks who've wokred as engineer and product managers? Otherwise they're still making out like bandits.
The Sackler family ultimately had to pay $6.5b of ~$10b they took out of the Purdue Pharma in its last decade of control.
It'd be more than fair that Zuckerberg has to pay 65% of his personal wealth gained by preying on adolescent insecurities.
And anyone else who was in a leadership role at Meta.
The deterrent is not allowing "Oops, I created a bad social outcome, but I'm keeping the profit I made from it" to be a viable way of getting rich.
And at least plant some doubt in folks doing evil that retribution might claw back their wealth in the future.
It's not a complicated judgement call.$0'ing the shares would probably spread the punishment roughly proportionally with the harms they did. It's not a perfect solution (people who previously sold their equity would be missed), but better than most.
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.
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.
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.
A true acolyte of the Church of Too Big To Fail speaks up...
I don't think the poster meant applying the death penalty to the corporation.
far greater consequences to let business become the defacto unelected government.
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.
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.
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.
$423 billion*
I have no love for Meta, but what about tiktok and youtube? What social media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged?
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.
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.
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.
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
Let Meta set the precedent, then the other will follow...
All of it is addiction engineered.
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...
Tiktok US is now participating in suppressing genocide news. Facebook doesn’t allow to follow Palestine interests
One lawsuit existing isn’t mutually exclusive to another one being filed, of course.
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?
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.
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.
Question is not whether they were designed to be addictive (of course it was - that’s the product), but whether it can be proven.
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.”
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?
This is more of a learning question. I recommend reading why law exists in the first place
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.
because sometimes what everyone thinks they know is wrong, and law is extremely nuanced, so everyone deserves a chance to defend themselves
Because that is how the law operates.
Feels like you'd just need a former employee who was in an engagement engineering meeting.
Here I am.
... who can't be bribed for a fraction of $1.4T.
Has to be a pretty decent sized fraction.
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.
This case isn't an SEC enforcement action.
I'm aware. Start one.
Social media is the new tobacco
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.
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'.
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
They could pay this off in like 1-6 months I imagine
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.
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.
I wonder exactly where everything kind of went south for Mark and his platform, or was this always the goal since Facebook's inception
It went south around this point:
I don't know why anyone trusted anything that came out of Zuckerberg's mouth for the last 20 years.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.
He could just swing by the whitehouse with a donation to make this go away. That seems to be the way now
Hasn’t that always been the way? A little Super PAC and some lobbying to grease the wheels
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
I find my niche VSTs by being active in music production circles, as well as actively making (shitty) music.
I browse KVR, Gearslutz, Synthtopia, etc.. and if something catches my interest, i investigate.
When I make (awful noise) music, if I have a need for a type of effect or instrument, I will look one up, and try it out if it suits what I'm trying to do.
I don't rely on instagram.
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.
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.
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.)
How do you trust advertisements? Do you do your own research after?
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.
I’m pretty sure all the benefits of social media exist in aspects other than the engagement-driven “algo” feed.
> 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.
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.
Alcohol consumption would be another good example of a culture we’ve accepted despite the deaths and limited positive benefits.
See the 18th and 21st Amendments to the US Constitution.
Yes, the 21st Amendment is democratic society accepting the negatives despite the limited positives.
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.
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.
> 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.
We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.
> Employees are not in a position of strength
Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?
Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.
I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
Yes, the men running concentration camps are 100% absolved of their culpability. Not their fault!
Meta is a private organization subject to the laws of the countries it operates in. Concentration camps are government entities, legalized by the country. Even then it's not always the choice of a person whether to comply the orders. But let's not go into extremes, they don't help the discussion.
This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."
If someone is a professional programmer and wants to maintain a similar level of income, where do you propose they go? There are similar perverse incentives at every other big tech company. While I agree that it's certainly possible for someone to avoid working for big tech and horrible companies in general, it's not possible for everyone to do so. Framing things the way you have merely supports unproductively railing at individuals who have worked for big tech, while actually making it harder to critique the underlying structural incentives.
To quote Don Draper: "that's what the money is for".
By all means go work for big tech if you want to, it's a free country, but then you don't get to wash your hands off the bad things your company's doing by saying stuff like "the execs made us do it" or "the execs overruled us".
There's nothing unproductive in calling out denying responsibility/culpability. Some would say it's practically mandatory.
> This framing is directly at odds with the top-level comment. "the whole business is rotten."
No, both apply. I agree it doesn't help to take aim at lower-level employees. The Zuck & co at the helm, and underlying causes that produce a laser-focus on "shareholder value", are both better targets.
But Meta has many employees, including various levels of management. Each of them can discuss shaky-ethics decisions, organise, protest, or.. quit.
Just saying that every cog in the machinery carries some responsibility. Some more than others.
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.
> 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.
>> The rank and file engineers and designers and PMs doing the work were all morally correct people
> Then why didn't they quit?
I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc. The Bay Area is very expensive, so I'd imagine that's true even for workers making otherwise very good salaries at Facebook. Then consider that the harms caused by Facebook are remote, abstract, and diffuse. Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.
Also, there's the frog in a pot effect: a lot of the problems with social media have only become well understood relatively recently. Maybe you'd chose no to join Facebook today, but would stay if you'd already worked there for 10 years.
> If I can choose to avoid working on morally compromising things, why can't they?
What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid? The modern world is full of them, many of them well publicized even if they're not in-your-face. IMHO, it's impossible to avoid them all without killing yourself.
> I can't speak for those people, but decisions like quitting your job aren't one-dimensional. Quitting a job can create severe hardships for a family, stress relationships to the breaking point, etc.
I can't disagree with that. But my point is more... own it, then.
OP's comment said the leaders are fully responsible. I argue the engineers are responsible too. If they made the decision they made because they don't want their family to leave the Bay Area then that's the decision they made: they put their family ahead of broader societal damage they're helping create. I might do the same for my family. But I wouldn't try to claim that I'm completely blameless in the scenario.
> Also, making the pushing for the right decision to only get overruled by the people in power can feel like doing enough for many people.
I suppose I would counter with "but it isn't".
> What other morally compromising things have you not chosen to avoid?
Again, I agree with what you're saying, every day involves some level of moral compromise. But the task I choose to dedicate most of my waking hours to, day in day out, is a little different from whether I buy free range eggs or not.
So you’re saying hard decisions… are hard for reasons? No shit Sherlock.
They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out.
> They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out.
One thing I've gotten tired of as I've gotten older is self-righteous judgement like that, when directed at the rank-and-file.
Your assignment: carefully inspect your life, and enumerate all the things which you are "stained with the consequences, because [you] were [a] coward who took the easy way out." There are lots because you're a human living in the modern world. Then, before you join the peanut gallery to judge smoeone, remember that guy's like you.
Sure, judge leaders like Zuckerberg like that, the buck stops with him, and his lieutenants who support his vision, and associates with "fuck you" money. But regular folks who need a job who try to do the right thing within their scope but are overridden? Come on.
‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.
What do you think that actually looks like?
The same damn thing.
What do you think the scientists working at big tobacco said to themselves?
The same damn thing.
The system won’t work without the ‘little people’ doing all the day to day.
This is, quite literally, the ‘banality of evil’.
> ‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.
For things like murdering people and genocide. When you're talking about controversial/gray areas, where there is no crime or clear consensus on punishable immorality, then no.
Expand that concept too far, too zealously, and you might as well shoot everyone because everyone's guilty. The world ain't black and white.
Facebook’s algorithms have quite literally caused that. Nearly a decade ago. And haven’t much improved.
And is clearly (with many, many studies on the topic over a decade plus) behind the rise of right wing nationalism and the fraying social contract.
Zuck is very, very aware of this - as leaked emails show. He knows, but continues anyway, and anyone at Meta at this point who also doesn’t know is being willfully ignorant.
This is the ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer’ argument.
Don’t worry, all employees were morally good people, who chose to stay and make millions from the harm to children they supposedly were resisting.
It’s not like meta was a charity. There was a lot of money being made by every one knowing the harm they were doing.
2017-2019… it sounds like maybe he did quit.
“The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”
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
> 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.
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.
Social should and will get the tobacco treatment. Social media is detrimental to public health and will get regulated/taxed to the point the industry will become unprofitable.
I just worry that the wrong thing will be regulated/taxed. It's the combination of algorithmic feed + global reach + monetization potential that makes social media so nasty. But it's easy to create "social media" regulations that would apply to sites like this one, or old-school forums.
In years past, when corporations saw the writing on the wall, they would actually get together and propose a set of regulations that could live with and satisfy the public. Because we are well past that point, yes, the wrong things and the rights things will get shoved into whatever regulation is coming.
> 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.
"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.
Sure, but lots of people are way more susceptible. Self-reflection is important here. The ability to question one's state and beliefs is the only tool to combat propaganda. Most people don't seem to do that; they parrot party lines and stay glued to their "news" networks.
Because for the most part, it works, and it’s way easier.
Until someone takes the car off a cliff, of course, but that almost never happens.
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?
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.
> 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.
We shouldn't. But to what end?
The alternative is excessive regulation. Sugar, especially fructose, is extremely destructive to the body and its more addictive than cocaine, but I don't see laws forbidding access to sugar. If you are that concerned with regulating people to death start with the greatest harms first and see just how far that goes.
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.
Nearly everybody is already aware, but some people choose to use Facebook anyways. That is their choice.
> 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.
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.
In order to follow clubs the local HS puts on you have to follow their Instagram account. They put the content/updates nowhere else.
"Need to be on IG dad so I can be active in extracurricular in HS."
Mandate APIs out and this problem goes away so folks can vibe code really simple solutions that keeps you off the site.
You are falsely conflating so many things. I highly doubt your local law prevents certain people from ever accessing porn or gambling, because its absurd to enforce. More likely is that they forbid use of employer information system to access vices, which is fine.
Secondly, your local municipality isn't forcing you to access Facebook just because they put some content there.
Third, if you feel that strongly about this then go to your city counsel and demand they put their content somewhere else.
A decade ago official entities like police or city hall would say "Follow us on Twitter to get the latest news", and would just use it as an instant publication platform (well it's what it was designed for)...
Yes but for local political points, they left Twitter last year, because "it was trendy". Besides, lots of old people living here, so they can't leave Facebook, otherwise the old people won't get their news!
As if they cared, most news are only useful for working people and families anyway... but oh well, they vote, they have time to complain loudly, and they have all the houses around here (because of course, why would they move to a better-suited flat place, and leave their now-too-large-for-a-couple houses so that families could move instead?), so the mayor has to be on Facebook, and not on Bluesky or Mastodon or somewhere else.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
All those software turds getting liquidated and replaced by open source would be the best thing for humanity altogether
What HUMANS do to humans. Any one of the people in power could have stopped this, and none of them did.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
TBH, I think this should be prosecuted as a felony. In the past, fines have not proven to motivate Meta to change.
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.
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.
“Harm” to be found is the job of the trial.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't happen to a nicer person.
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
This is why you should install an ad blocker
...probably with a referral string that results in them getting paid, too.