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Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

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Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#231

Post by Manuel_D »

dfxm12 wrote: post #202
CodeSgt wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> knowingly > exploitable > vulnerable None of these are cut and dry. How vulnerable does someone have to be before you can exploit them? How harmful does the behavior have to be before it’s exploitation? What is “knowingly” in an organization? How should events be handled if it’s a single engineer operating in the shadows vs a board decision? etc etc etc The answers to these question may seem obvious to you, and som…

It's not about any of our opinions. As the article says, there is a whistleblower from Meta saying that this is documented. The lawsuit is what's going to sort it out.

The internal study presented by the whistleblower actually found that Instagram made users feel better more often than it made them feel worse: https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Instagram-Te...

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#232

Post by chowells »

CodeSgt wrote: post #203
dfxm12 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about any of our opinions. As the article says, there is a whistleblower from Meta saying that this is documented. The lawsuit is what's going to sort it out.

That just means it’s about the opinion of the government, which isn’t much better in my opinion (and is arguably worse).

No, it means it's the opinion of the jury. Their job is to determine fact.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#233

Post by vasdae »

firecall wrote: post #223
Zufriedenheit wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about all the small, independent forums in the internet? For them it would really be impossible to comply with monitoring every post. Often they are hobby projects.

I frequent the OCAU forum here in Australia. Moderating the News board became too arduous and carried potential legal liability. So they turned the board off. It’s really not that hard. And anyway, just because you can’t fix everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fix something. All or nothing thinking leads to inaction.

So we can only have discussion forums where the owner is a big company that can afford to have a team of moderators around the clock. Yes, that's going to end well. (For the elites, that is.)

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#234

Post by glimshe »

username332211 wrote: post #221
ianai wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats obviously not a primary concern. Similar to how your home kitchen isn't going to have a food inspector show up and close it.

The comparison you're making is nonsensical. My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does. If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way. Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart fro…

Anything at scale is something else entirely.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#235

Post by nitwit005 »

glimshe wrote: post #129

Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR prob…

> Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR problem, not MINE.

Nope. It's also your problem, because it has to be enforced somehow. Few websites are age appropriate for young children (this one certainly isn't), so perfect enforcement would mean essentially no viewing websites without login, and all logins requiring display of face and government issued ID to live webcam.

The ID check is already in place for several countries with YouTube if you try to view an age restricted video.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#236

Post by nitwit005 »

firecall wrote: post #223
Zufriedenheit wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what about all the small, independent forums in the internet? For them it would really be impossible to comply with monitoring every post. Often they are hobby projects.

I frequent the OCAU forum here in Australia. Moderating the News board became too arduous and carried potential legal liability. So they turned the board off. It’s really not that hard. And anyway, just because you can’t fix everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and fix something. All or nothing thinking leads to inaction.

A lot of discussion forums died that way. They shut down the problematic parts, but those were also the parts people were engaged with.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#237

Post by Alex3917 »

username332211 wrote: post #221
ianai wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats obviously not a primary concern. Similar to how your home kitchen isn't going to have a food inspector show up and close it.

The comparison you're making is nonsensical. My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers. The forum I host trough a server in my cupboard does. If you want to make a comparison, it's between a small family restaurant and a giant fast food chain. It may surprise you but food inspectors treat both in roughly the same way. Face it. Nothing meaningfully separates my forum from giant social media companies apart fro…

> My home kitchen doesn't routinely serve strangers.

Most states have cottage food laws, with basic regulations for small-scale commercial production. E.g. you need to take a course on food safety, you need your water tested, and you can only sell up to $X per year, but you aren't subject to random inspections. There is no reason why the web shouldn't be regulated similarly, with different rules based on the size of the audience.

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#238

Post by manuelabeledo »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #156
0xParlay wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean FB engineers are specifically optimizing for toxicity at an algorithmic level. It’s the product. You can’t perform controlled experiments to measure the profitability of depression and also fiend ignorance. You’re all very welcome to whatabout but working at FB is a stain on your character.

I mean no, they're specifically optimizing for engagement. It just turns out that toxicity fuels engagement.

Isn't that a bit like tobacco companies "optimizing for engagement", but knowing that the same ingredients cause cancer?

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#239

Post by MrRolleyes »

seanw444 wrote: post #201
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #138

"harmful youth marketing" ? Adults are just as dumb as kids, and can actually impact the rest of the world with their dumbness. We should be suing them for harmful marketing, period. I have had adult friends have literal emotional breakdowns because of social media's harmful effects.

Adults have a lot more responsibility for their actions. One of those actions is choosing to participate in a system that is widely considered harmful in multiple ways.

[dead]

Re: Meta sued by states over harmful youth marketing

#240

Post by paulddraper »

glimshe wrote: post #129

Irrespective of the incidental value "Meta" provides, let's keep in mind that no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users - especially children. Social media companies argue that they can't monitor every post and do appropriate age verification online because it would be "impossible to scale". Well, tough luck. Not being able to scale is YOUR prob…

> no business has a right to exist independently from its standing in the system of laws and the health of its users

I don't understand what that means, and how I can know if my business in inside or outside the law.

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