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.
> 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 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.
"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.
> 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".
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
I see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
I think you could ignore their legal argument in the civilized world but in the USA perhaps not. The very concept of a "formally recognized diagnosis" is American health insurance industry gaslighting (also not a formal diagnosis fwiw). It means nothing in other countries.
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ 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'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.)
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.
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.
> 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.
As you know, law lags behind. Even when defendants are found not guilty, these cases are (apparently) necessary precedent to 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
“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
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 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.
> 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.
> 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".
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
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.”
Scary and utter chilling to read. Reminds me of the Firestone scandal in some ways but likely with far reaching worse consequences for society.
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.
Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
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.
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.
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.
$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 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.
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.
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?
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 $1 million in sanctions is ordered. The range for awards is between 10% and 30% of the money collected.
This case isn't an SEC enforcement action.
I'm aware. Start one.
Social media is the new tobacco
I see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
I think you could ignore their legal argument in the civilized world but in the USA perhaps not. The very concept of a "formally recognized diagnosis" is American health insurance industry gaslighting (also not a formal diagnosis fwiw). It means nothing in other countries.
I actually like Instagram, primarily for the ads.
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ 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'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?
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
Couldn't happen to a nicer person.
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.
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.
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 to 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.
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.
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 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.
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.