Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing.
It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people.
Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.
The number of my outer circle of friends who fall for the “copied profile” adding of unknown people or accept a friend request from the attractive young woman who somehow is interested in them is shocking. (I’m gauging this from looking at the “mutual friends” in the friend request.)
This is a silent crisis impacting almost eveyone. My grandma personally had her gold stolen by a scammer.
She is now in a home for dimensia.
There’s tons of media about it, tons of people are aware of elder fraud etc but people don’t want to think about the vulnerable of society. There’s been jokes about it and media about it going back decades.
People are aware but solving it requires an uncomfortable level of change in society, training and regulations.
As an aside, both Thelma and The Beekeeper are recent movies about elders being scammed and revenge being taken. Both very different but enjoyable.
You can (and should) have That Talk with your parents about scams on the internet, but if they're still falling for them and not getting the message, maybe it's time to gently steer them off the Internet. We take the car keys away from people who can't handle driving anymore.
I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.
Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.
Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?
It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.
I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.
You’d be surprised how little drama there is around this.
I’d note that the department that made open LLMs hasn’t produced any work since they produced a Gemini 2.5 Flash equivalent with much better tool calling, because the God King threw a fit. Without reasoning. And they had a reasoning model on deck that was cancelled too.
With that attitude, how long does it take to justify going after the next Meta?
Now I’m imagining I meet someone who is on the other side of the interview table having these thoughts. Are my capabilities ignored because they are already prejudiced to a decision I made years prior? What if my answer, trying to improve issues from within, is not good enough?
This new world is scary..
https://old.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/wiki/solutions/youtube
It's baffling to me that they get away with this.
Everybody, including journalists and tech people, is moving about their own algorithmic bubble nearly all the time. They just can't imagine how bad the situation has become out there. We're turning a blind eye to the very thing that is destroying our societies.
It's not "as if" it "is". There is a scant difference between an LLM and a recommendation algorithm picking what to "say" out of what, 100 billion or more messages? Because the pool to choose from is so enormous, speech becomes not what one person typed but what one algorithm plucked out of the haystack to show, to influence, and to manipulate for financial gain.
Good luck getting him, his administration, or his Department of Justice, to hold YouTube to a higher standard.
Maybe EU's regulation of digital markets isn't such a bad idea after all.
I’m not sure how much we can blame individual companies for this. Obviously they should be doing more - shutting down accounts that message people at random, for instance, but I feel like the scammers will find a way.
I also don’t know what else we can do. It should be easier for kids (or anyone else) to shut down their parent’s accounts at least once this happens, stop all wire and crypto transfers, etc.
Past that, I really don’t know.
They have a policy that if a scammer’s ad spend makes up more than 0.15% of Meta revenue, moderators must protect the scammer instead of blocking it.
Meta is working hard to scam your dad for ad spend. It’s hugely profitable for them and they are helping to grow it per internal policy. They are only interested in fostering big-time scammers.
These are verified facts that make up the substance of my message:
- Meta protects their biggest scammers, per internal policy from leadership
- Meta makes a huge profit from these scammers (10% of total revenue; or in other words, their scam revenue is approximately 5x larger than the total Oculus revenue)
- The scams that Meta promotes represent one-third of the total online scams in the US
It may be as simple as "there are a lot of Meta employees browsing HN."
And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers.
Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities?
My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.
https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
International law and extradition has already proven to be too slow and small scale to be effective.
Offline too.
Predation on the elderly is an industry.
Our own attempts to do something about (successful) scammers were meant with utter indifference by my parent's state's (Arizona) attorney general, county sheriffs, local police.
and we’re like “you’re free now, go home” (because of the economic sanctions and raid)
we recently had a vote on whether she should be booted from the chat, we voted no for the comedic value
so anyway sorry you’re going through that, its wild out there
Meta (and social media more broadly) are the only case where we have (in my opinion) substantiated allegations of a company being aware of a large, negative impact on society (mental wellness, of teens no less), and still prioritizing growth and profit. The mix is usually: grow at all costs mindset, being "data-driven", optimizing for engagement/addiction, and monetizing via ads. The center of gravity of this has all been Meta (and social media), but that thinking has permeated lots of other tech as well.
My point is, that all of these big tech giants will find, that they are a harmful cancer to society, at least in parts. Which is probably why they don't even "research" it. This way they can continue to act oblivious to this fact.
100%. This is what people miss in this thread when they're talking about seeing to punish companies who knowingly harm society. All that is going to do is discourage companies from ever seeking to evaluate the effects that they're having.
Social media is abusive and utterly psychotic and narcissistic, because that is the type of people who created it using basic psychological abuse and submission tactics. Banks, casinos, games, hollywood/TV, news/politics, social media, contemporary academia and religion, etc.; they all function on being endorphin dealers/dispensers.
I mean, let's be real. That's really isn't a big company that achieves scale that doesn't have skeletons in the closet. Period.
The internet can provide an immense amount of good for society, but if we net it on overall impact, I suspect that the internet has overall had a severely negative impact on society. And this effect is being magnified by companies who certainly know that what they're doing is socially detrimental, but they're making tons of money doing it.
One hypothesis for why Africa is underdeveloped is they have too many inefficient mom-and-pop businesses selling uneven-quality products, and not enough major brands working to build strong reputations and exploit economies of scale.
I’d argue that life improvement is so small it’s not worth the damage of false demand. I can maybe think of one product that I saw a random ad for that I actually still use today. I’d say >90% of products being advertised these days are pointless garbage or actually net negative.
Advertising is cancer for the mind and our society severely underestimates the harm it’s done.
And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone. For instance now there are free classes from most of all top universities online, on just about every topic, that people can enroll and participate in. There are literally 0 barriers to receiving a free premium quality education. Yet the number of people that participate in this is negligible and overwhelmingly composed of people that would have had no less success even prior to the internet.
By contrast the negatives are extremely widespread on both an individual and social level. As my post count should demonstrate, I love the internet. And obviously this site is just one small segment of all the things I do on the internet. In fact my current living would be impossible without it. Yet if I had the choice of pushing a button that would send humanity on a trajectory where we sidestep (or move along from) the internet, I wouldn't hesitate in the slightest to push it.
That study is a correlation with self reported satisfaction. The effect size is that a doubling of ad spend results in a 3% change in satisfaction. I struggled to find good numbers but it appears as if ad spending in the USA has been a more or less constant percentage of GDP growth.
Thus the only real conclusion you can draw from your argument is that any increase in unhappiness caused by the internet was caused by its associated GDP growth increasing ad spend per capita.
Personally, I do think advertising has become more damaging precisely due to the internet but good luck proving it.
> And a practical point on this topic is that the benefits of the internet are, in practice, fringe, even if freely available to everyone
Ok, nevermind. I can't take anything else you say seriously when you call the ways the the internet has improved people's lives "fringe". I take it you never tried to take a bus pre-internet? Drive a car across the cohntry? Or lookup any information? The internet's effects on people is so far from fringe that it has seeped into almost everything we do at a fundamental level. Perhaps because of that you can't see it.
The only thing left is questionable flavoring agents and dodgy shops with THC oil vapes (although that kind of contamination is now known and it's been ages since I last heard anything).
At large, vapes are better than cigarettes.
How many people are directly exposed to it daily? Technicians and performers are probably it. Everyone else is very rare so it's possibly any side effects took a while for medical community to pick up on until everyone started vaping.
>At large, vapes are better than cigarettes.
Better yes, they are harm reduction over cigarettes. However, it's not "good" and should be as regulated as cigarettes are.
Before this the pro-vape crowd used to push the trope of "it's used in nebulizers", nope, it's not. Ventolin does not use propylene glycol: https://www.drugs.com/pro/ventolin.html Maxair? Nope: https://www.drugs.com/pro/maxair-autohaler.html Airomir did not.
> There is one study looking at the potential to use PG as a carrier for an inhaled medicine (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18158714) and another which mentions that PG or ethanol may be used as a cosolvent (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12425745) in nebulizers, but no evidence presented of an asthma inhaler or nebulizer that is actually used today containing PG.
Even then, there's a huge difference between "being on stage with a fog machine", and 3-4 puffs a day of a smaller amount of a nebulizer, than chronic hundreds of puffs a day with vapes.
Robinhood has entered the chat
Why would one specific industry be better? The toxic people will migrate to that industry and profit at the expense of society. It’s market efficiency at work.
Yes, but did any industry live long enough to not become the villain?
Early OpenAI set the tone of safe, open-source AI.
The next few competitors also followed OpenAI’s lead.
And yet, here we are.
Early OpenAI told a bunch of lies that even (some of) their most-ardent fans are now seeing through. They didn't start off good and become the villain.
Um, wat?
tip of the iceberg.
Social media is way down on the list of companies aware of their negative impact. The negative impact arguably isn't even central to their business model, which it certainly is for the other industries mentioned.
Them doing nothing about hate speech that fanned the flames for a full blown genocide is pretty terrible too. They knew the risks, were warned, yet still didn't do anything. It would be unfair to say the Rohingya genocide is the fault of Meta, but they definitely contributed way too much.
We can strip systems like X, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok, etc of their addictive parts and get back to utility to value. We can have systems not owned by US corporations that are fundamentally valuable to society. But it requires us, the tech savvy engineering folk to make those leaps. Because the rest of society can't do it. We are in the position of power. We have the ability.
We can do something about it.
I wrote something to that effect two days ago on a platform I'm building. https://mu.xyz/post?id=1763732217570513817
I remember reading that oil companies were aware of global warming in internal literature even back in the 80's
Not so long as we don't punish them for failure to. We need a corporate death penalty for an organization that, say, knowingly conspires to destroy the planet's habitability. Then the bean counters might calculate the risk of doing so as unacceptable. We're so ready and willing to punish individuals for harm they do to other individuals, but if you get together in a group then suddenly you can plot the downfall of civilization and get a light fine and carry on.
Why not the actual death penalty? Or put another way, why not sanctions on the individuals these entities are made up of? It strikes me that qualified immunity for police/government officials and the protections of hiding behind incorporation serve the same purpose - little to no individual accountability when these entities do wrong. Piercing the corporate veil and pursuing a loss of qualified immunity are both difficult - in some cases, often impossible - to accomplish in court, thus incentivizing bad behavior for individuals with those protections.
Maybe a reform of those ideas or protocols would be useful and address the tension you highlight between how we treat "individuals" vs individuals acting in the name of particular entities.
As an aside, both protections have interesting nuances and commonalities. I believe they also highlight another tension (on the flip-side of punishment) between the ability of regular people to hold individuals at these entities accountable in civil suits vs the government maintaining a monopoly on going after individuals. This monopoly can easily lead to corruption (obvious in the qualified immunity case, less obvious but still blatant in the corporate case, where these entities and their officers give politicians and prosecutors millions and millions of dollars).
As George Carlin said, it's a big club. And you ain't in it.
Corporal punishment exists for individuals too.
Perhaps it should be on the table for executives (etc) whose companies knowingly caused the deaths or other horrific outcomes for many, many people?
You can't do any of this without a strong, independent, judiciary, strongly resistant to corruption. Making that happen is harder than it sounds.
And it still won't help, because the perps are sociopaths and they can't process consequences. So it's not a deterrent.
The only effective way to deal with this is to bar certain personality types from positions of power.
You might think that sounds outrageous, but we effectively have that today, only in reverse. People with strong moral codes are actively excluded from senior management.
It's a covert farming process that excludes those who would use corporate power constructively rather than abusing it for short-term gain.
It strikes me that if you also appreciate this distinction, then your remedy to corporations that have too much power is to give the government even more power?
Personally, I would like to see more creative solutions that weaken both government and corporations and empower individuals to hold either accountable. I think the current gap between individuals and the other two is too severe, I'm not sure how making the government even more powerful actually helps the individual. Do you want the current American government to be more powerful? Would your answer have been different last year?
Of course, our current government has a lot of problems, but that doesn't mean I don't want the government to have power. I just want it to have power to do what the population actually wants it to do (or, perhaps, what the population will actually be happiest with).
What would be your proposed mechanism for empowering individuals? How would such a mechanism not ultimately rely on the individual leveraging some larger external power structure (like a government)? I think if we want to empower all individuals roughly equally (i.e., not in proportion to their wealth or the like), then what we wind up with is something I'd call a government. Definitely not the one we have, but government nonetheless.
I think however when we acknowledge that men are not angels, and that therefore government itself is dangerous merely as a centralization of power, then no, you cannot simply say well government is supposed to be of a different type of power than corporations. Because again, in reality this is often not the case. This is why several of the American founders and many of those who fought in that revolution also became anti federalists or argued against constitutional ratification.
I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think there has ever been a situation where it is accurate to say the population as a whole controls the government. In practice it doesn't work that way, and is about as useful as saying well the market controls corporations. I think something more like anti federalism could use a renaissance... the government should be weak in more cases. Individuals should be empowered. A government power to hold a corporation accountable could then rest on simply its strict duty to enforce a civil remedy. That is of a different nature than the government deciding on its own who (and more importantly - who not) to prosecute.
But I appreciate your push back, there are indeed no easy answers.
Doctors selling you fentanyl so you can be sedated for surgery is a good thing.
Drug Dealers selling you fentanyl so you can get high is a bad thing
Of course they care about you getting high, that's their sales pitch
(In the case of a corporation, also many people might be involved, some of whom might not know what it is, therefore increasing the possibility of error.)
However, terminating the corporation might help (combined with fines if they had earned any profit from it so far), if there is not an effective and practical lesser punishment which would prevent this harm.
However, your other ideas seem to be valid points; one thing that you mention is, government monopoly can (and does) lead to corruption (although not only this specific kind).
This question of course currently has a very real real world parallel.
But, yes people do find all sorts of justifications, whether or not they are any good (although sometimes it is not immediately clear if it is any good, unfortunately).
Wait, why? You can have morals that don't treat all living things as equal.
Surely "plot the downfall of civilization" is an exaggeration. Knowing that certain actions have harmful consequences to the environment or the humanity, and nevertheless persisting in them, is what many individuals lawfully do without getting together.
The 1980s is when the issue was finally brought into the political conversation. Shell internal documents go back as far as 1962: https://www.desmog.com/2023/03/31/lost-decade-how-shell-down...
As for science itself: the first scientific theories on greenhouse effects were published in the 1850s -- and the first climate model was published in 1896: https://daily.jstor.org/how-19th-century-scientists-predicte...
Companies, non-profits, regulators, legislative branches of government, courts, presidential administrations, corporate bureaucrats, government bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, regular citizens. They cannot self-police.
That's the motivation for having a system of _checks and balances_[a]: We want power, including the power to police, to be distributed in a society.
---
Companies can't. Employees can. If someone's still working at Meta, they are ok with it.
1. "The Tobacco Institute was founded in 1958 as a trade association by cigarette manufacturers, who funded it proportionally to each company's sales. It was initially to supplement the work of the Tobacco Industry Research Committee (TIRC), which later became the Council for Tobacco Research. The TIRC work had been limited to attacking scientific studies that put tobacco in a bad light, and the Tobacco Institute had a broader mission to put out good news about tobacco, especially economic news." [0]
2. "[Lewis Powell] worked for Hunton & Williams, a large law firm in Richmond, Virginia, focusing on corporate law and representing clients such as the Tobacco Institute. His 1971 Powell Memorandum became the blueprint for the rise of the American conservative movement and the formation of a network of influential right-wing think tanks and lobbying organizations, such as The Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council."
so does government
Government in functioning democratic societies is policed by voters, journalists, and many independent watchdog groups.
Maybe there is a reference country, at some period in living memory hopefully, we could use as a reference?
Take a look at France, where a former president went to prison. Okay, it got commuted to house arrest (same sentence as a former PM candidate for president), but that's still a pretty serious punishment, especially for a such a high level politician.
There is no house arrest, he appealed and is innocent until proven guilty. People stay in prison after appealing in case there is a serious risk of them fleeing the country or in case they present a danger to society, both of these have been deemed low enough
The public is supposed to police the government, and replace it if it acts against the public interest.
But now that you mention it, perhaps we should also give everyone an equal vote on replacing the boards of too-big-to-fail corporations
The US-ians voted twice for Trump so far. I have difficulty seeing the good it did for the world , let alone the USA and the US-ians.
Specifically for corporations, giving everyone in the world the power to vote for dismantling Meta (a world mega-corp) might be interesting to see , though.
The problem is that they wants have been steered in that direction by decades of cynical media manipulation, but that's just the nature of democracy.
But yes, a lot of people look at the insanity of putting an unqualified moron who doesn't believe in germ theory in charge of public health and thunderously applaud. He certainly that delivered to them.
Like Apple's "scanning for CSAM", and people said "Oh, there's a threshold so it won't false report, you have to have 25+ images (or whatever) before it will"... Like okay, avoid false reporting, but that policy is one messy story away from "Apple says it doesn't care about the first 24 CSAM images on your phone".
We can speculate. I think they just did not give a fuck. Usually limiting grooming and abuse of minors requires limiting the access of those minors to various activities on the platform, which means those kids go somewhere else. Meta specifically wanted to promote it’s use among children below 13 to stimulate growth, that often resulting in the platform becoming dangerous for minors was not seen as their problem.
If your company is driven by growth über alles à la venture capitalism, it will mean the growth goes before everything else. Including child safety.
> I think they just did not give a fuck.
It's that people like Zuck and Sandberg were just so happily ensconced in their happy little worlds of private jets and Davos and etc., that they really could not care less if it wasn't something that affected them (and really, the very vast majority of issues facing Meta, don't affect them, only their bonuses and compensation).
Your actions will lead to active harm? "But not to me, so, so what, if it helps our numbers".
In some spaces the moral panic has moved beyond social media and now it’s about short form video. Ironically you can find this panic spreading on social media.
Likewise in few generations we hopefully find a way to transfer the cost in medical bills of mental health caused by these companies to be paid by those companies in taxes, like we did with tobacco. At this point using these apps is hopefully seen to be as lame as smoking is today.
For the US, would it be accurate to put "sex" on there as well?
Social media seems far more dangerous and harder to control because of the power it grants its "friends". It'll be much harder to moderate than anything else you mentioned.
Society did not collapse. That does not mean those things did not have negative effects on society.
Completely coincidentally, I had quit smoking a few weeks before.
The feelings of loss, difficulty in sleeping, feeling that something was missing, and strong desire to get back to smoking/FB was almost exactly the same.
And once I got over the hump, the feelings of calm, relaxation, clarity of thought, etc were also similar.
It was then that I learnt, well before anyone really started talking about social media being harmful, that social media (or at least FB…I didn’t really get into any other social media until much later), was literally addictive and probably harmful.
In 2014, Facebook published a paper showing how they can manipulate users’ emotions with their news feed algorithm.
Facebook ran this test on 700k users without consent.
I deactivated my account the day I read that paper and never looked back.
We are super social insane monkey creatures that get high on social interaction, which in many ways is a good thing, but can turn into toxic relationships towards family members or even towards a social media application. It is not very dissimilar how coin slot machines or casinos lure you into addiction. They use exactly the same means, therefore they should be regulated like gambling.
The News Feed killed the positive social interaction on the site, so it had essentially become a (very bad) news aggregator for me.
Which is why I found it so comparable to quitting smoking.
A smoker doesn’t feel “better” after quitting smoking. Even over a decade after having quit I bet if I smoked a cigarette right now I would feel much nicer than I did right before I smoked it. However, I would notice physiological changes, like a faster heart rate, slight increase in jumpiness, getting upset sooner, etc.
Quitting FB was similar. I didn’t feel “better”, but several psycho-physiological aspects of my body just went down a notch.
But I get what you are saying.
In a text message in 2021, Mark Zuckerberg said that he wouldn’t say that child safety was his top concern “when I have a number of other areas I’m more focused on like building the metaverse.” Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.
Fair point, but the fuller context is absurd—the OP's rendering is correct in tone and emphasis.
I suppose the harm from social networks is not as pronounced (since you generally interact only with people and content you opted to follow (e.g. Mastodon).
Coca leaves can be chewed as a stimulant and it’s relatively harmless, though a bit addictive. Extract cocaine and snort it and it’s a lot more addictive. Turn it into freebase crack and it hits even harder and is even more addictive.
If this is coca leaves, Twitter is cocaine and TikTok is crack.
You should absolutley expect companies to do whatever it takes to make the most profit, so long as they don't break the law. As a society, this failure should be put entirely at the foot of elected legislators who have been entrusted to pass laws to protect the public.
You shouldn't have to use less technology, quit social media, etc.. This things keep happening again and again, but by the time there are laws to do something about it, it's too late. At first I thought this reminded me of the tobacco industry, but now that I think about it, this is more akin to alcohol. You can't prohibit it, and you can only restrict it so much because of how abundant its use has become. But still, lots of lawmaking can still be done.
Did they pick people at random and ask those people to stop for a while, or is this about people who choose to stop for their own reasons?
I don't think it's even a stretch at this point to compare Meta to cigarette companies.
HN has seen this quote many times; tech workers willfully or naively ignore the harm their contributions cause as long as the life changing paychecks keep coming, letting them pretend that they are too far removed from the damage to be responsible.
Then comes the classic post “I’m leaving FAANG, so brave of me <quiet-part>funded entirely by the same extraction and harm I once insisted I didn’t see.</quiet-part>"
Section 230 is meant to be a safe harbor for a platform not to be considered a publisher but where is the line between hosting content and choosing what third-party content people see? I would argue that if you have sufficient content, you could de facto publish any content you want by choosing what people see.
"The Algorithm" is not some magical black box. Everything it does is because some human tinkered with it to produce a certain result. The thumb is constantly being put on the scale to promote or downrank certain content. As we're seeing in recent years, this is done to cozy up to certain administrations.
The First Amendment really is a double-edged sword here because I think these companies absolutely encourage unhealthy behavior and destructive content to a wide range of people, including minors.
I can't but help consider the contrast with China who heavily regulate this sort of thing. Yes, China also suppresses any politically sensitive content but, I hate to break it to you, so does every US social media company.
Everyone that is important to me (and not a slave, nor enslaver of their friends) is on Signal anyways
> Zuckerberg also shot down or ignored requests by Clegg to better fund child safety work.
I doubt serious consequences will follow this time, as there haven't been following serious consequences all the previous times Meta/Facebook has been found guilty of crimes. However, it can serve as one more event to point out to naive people, who don't want to believe the IT person, that FB/Meta is evil, because they don't want to give up some interaction on it, or some comfort they have, using FB/Meta's apps or tools. I think it's a natural tendency most of us have. We use something, then we want extra good proof when someone claims that thing is bad, because we don't want to change and stop using the thing. Plus FB/Meta will do anything they can, to make people addicted to their platforms.
Meta delenda est.
Meta leadership has had opportunity after opportunity to do the hard thing, and be the force for good in a manner that they can live with.
Even more frustrating - the decision making shares give Zuckerberg control.
"Social media was a mistake, just like the internet" oh ok so we should just give up our gmails and reddits and everything because people insist on the widest possible swathe of categories
But actually when it comes to Metabook... I don't think Zuckerberg cares about anybody, and more to the point they refuse to give you a chronological service just for starters
People have died and their friends haven't known about it because the algorithm never showed them. People have noticed messages they've got from people trying to get in touch with them years later, because Zuck feels you should be using Facebook all the time, not email https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433
When your company is run by a megalomaniac this is what you get...
The converse story about the defendants' briefs would have the headline "Plaintiffs full of shit, US court filing alleges" but you wouldn't take Meta's defense at face value either, I assume.
https://www.lieffcabraser.com/pdf/2025-11-21-Brief-dckt-2480...
Doesn't seem like you're making this comment in good faith, and/or you're very invested in Meta somehow.
I loved MTV as a kid but it was as different to social media as can be.
Half the time you would turn it on and not like the video playing then switch the channel. Even if you liked the video that was playing, half the time the next video was something you didn't like so you would switch the channel.
Now imagine if MTV had used machine learning to predict the next video to show me personally that would best cause me to not change the channel.
That is not even really a different scale but a different category.
The best time to start doing the right thing is now. Unless the argument here is “since people got away with it before it’s not fair to punish people now.”
This was a broad, simplified, unsupported claim that cannot be compared to the demonstrable, well-studied impacts of social media on people’s - especially young people’s - minds. They are not even remotely on the same level.
If we want to debate MTV specifically yes there are well studied, proven impacts of how various media can make people think of their own bodies and lives etc. that can be harmful. But again it’s not remotely to the same degree. Social media can be uniquely poisonous. There are a myriad of studies out there that confirm this but I’m happy to link some if you want me to.
If somebody wanted to it would probably not be very difficult to write an article all but conclusively proving that Instagram is more harmful than MTV.
Is the evidence better this time, and the argument for corporate misconduct more ironclad? Maybe, I guess, but I'm skeptical.
Isn’t religion where we culturally put “not doing things that are bad for you”? And everyone is allowed to have a different version of that?
Maybe instead of regulating social media, we should be looking at where the teeth of religion went even in our separation of church and state society. If everyone thinks their kids shouldn’t do something, enforcing that sounds like exactly what purpose religion is practically useful for.
In any case, one ought to distinguish between "You shouldn't do things which are bad for you," and "You shouldn't do things you know are bad for others." Especially, "Giant corporations with ambiguous structures of responsibility shouldn't be allowed to do things which are bad for others."
Alternatively, being raised well by their parents and the Community around them.
Religion is not a needed component of that.
People who x reported y is one of those phrases.
“people who stopped using Facebook for a week reported lower feelings of depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison,”
This is the same argument you see in cosmetic advertising as "Women who used this serum reported reduction in wrinkles"
If the study has evidence that people who x actually shows y, It would be irresponsible to not say that directly. Dropping to "people reported" seems like an admission that there was no measurable effect other than the influence of the researchers on the opinions of the subjects.
Mental state can be difficult in this respect because it is much harder to objectively measure internal states. the fact that it is harder to do, doesn't grant validity to subjective answers though.
I was once part of a study that did this. It was fascinating seeing something that appeared to have no effect being written up using both "people reported" and "significant" (meaning, not likely by chance, but implying a large effect to the casual reader).
What you a saying is valid criticism of the study but people here already made up their mind, so they downvote.
Another point to add is that 1 week is way too short - assuming there is an effect it might disappear or go in reverse after 1 month.
To all downvoters: if you think of yourself as smart rational people, please just use search/AI to see for yourself whether there is high quality evidence of _causal_ impact of social media on kids/mental health. The results are mixed at best.
I find the downvote without counterargument to be an odd response to a good faith post. It seems like it would strengthen the argument if the message they send is "I don't have a counter to this but I don't like it and I don't like that others will see this point of view"
I have come to realise that I have a much higher threshold when it comes to upvoting, downvoting, or rating things. It seems like a lot of people freely upvote, like, heart, or downvote without a care. We live in a world where a 4.8 star rating (comprised entirely of an aggregate of zero and five star ratings) is considered a concern. So I try not to be bothered by it, but I'm pretty sure subconsciously a downvote hurts more than someone saying "I disagree"