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Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

nytimes.com

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Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#201

Post by jmyeet »

lokar wrote: post #166
jmyeet wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an opinion and I believe it's wrong. And you just have to look at the statute to see why [1]: > (c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material > (2) Civil liability > (A)any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or oth…

I don't expect that to work, but who knows. Editors "rank", curate, select, present, etc content to people, and have for a long time, and it's always understood to be speech. Remember, according to that link, 230 does not give platforms any new rights. It simply makes it easier for them to end cases faster and cheaper, that they would have already won on 1st amendment grounds.

Neither you nor I can say definitively what the law is until it's been testedin court and really until the Supreme Court weighs in and that just hasn't happened yet. At least I'm saying "this is my opinion (and, as an aside, I'm not alone in that opinion as I've pointed out). Condescendingly posting a "here's why you're wrong" link doesn't make you smart. Or informed. Or correct. Just confidently wrong.

Even in this post you contradict yourself. If S230 doesn't grant more rights, why does it matter? If it makes it easier, then it's giving you something, just like anti-SLAPP statutes give you something (and matter).

Also, this isn't a First Amendment issue. Nobody is questioning whether a platform can publish their own content or somebody else's. The issue is liability for what it is expressed. Publishing your own content comes under a strict liability [1] standard. Section 230 establishes that publishing third-party content does not, which again contradicts the point that that "230 does not give platforms any new rights".

Wouldn't you agree there's a difference between being able to post defamatory or false statements with or without liability?

[1]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/strict_liability

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#202

Post by jarjoura »

randycupertino wrote: post #182
Barbing wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[There are] legions of highly educated adults [at Meta] trying to increase [child] engagement Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life? Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?

I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger. Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never…

I just find it ridiculous that we as a society have allowed CEOs to become that wealthy. It's one thing to make your money from lucky investments, and become a billionaire. It's another to get there by simply running a corporation.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#203

Post by throwaway85825 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #188
bsimpson wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shotgun approach (suing FB, TikTok, Snapchat, and Google simultaneously) makes this sound as ridiculous as the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline). Suing Facebook for systematically behaving badly is one thing, if you can prove it and prove it harmed you. Suing _everybody_ is one random person getting rich for… bei…

> the punchline "woman sues McDonalds for coffee being too hot" (distinct from that actual case, which was less ridiculous than the headline). Whenever the McDonald's coffee case comes up, I always see caveats about how the actual case was a lot less sensational than the "woman sues McDonald's for coffee being too hot" headline implies. I strongly disagree. I'm very familiar with the details of the actual case, and t…

In terms of expectation, how many people think coffee is normally capable of causing 3rd degree burns?

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#204

Post by dymk »

gzread wrote: post #189
dymk wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using the war on drugs as an example as a successful social movement is kinda hilarious

People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they? And only the ones that were included in the war on drugs (not nicotine, alcohol, caffeine)? So it was a success.

> People still generally think drugs are bad, don't they?

No

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#205

Post by akabul0us »

> which could expose the internet giants to further financial damages and force changes to their products This is so wildly untrue, it's either downright deception on the part of the NYT or they simply don't know how to do math. In this case the judgement was for $3M. To keep the numbers simple for the sake of this comparison, let's not get into the 70/30 split of this amount and just imagine that YouTube (Google) ((Alphabet)) had to pay the entire amount. Their revenue (again, keeping it simple, don't @ me) for 2025 was $350B. Humans don't typically conceptualize the difference between millions and billions very easily, so let's knock everything down a few orders of magnitude. At that rate they take in around a billion dollars a day. So imagine this as a person who takes in about a thousand dollars a day, and has a yearly salary of $350,000 (quite comfortable to live on, while not being obscene). Now apply the same math to the amount they have to pay, and what do you get? A grand total of $0.03. You'd have to do it with a bank transfer (or use a nickel and overpay considerably). I make considerably less than $350K/yr, and I can still confidently say that if I had to pay a fine of 3¢, that wouldn't just make me not take the fine and the court that issued it seriously, it would have the opposite effect it's intended to. I would now see that it costs me next to nothing to keep doing things the way I always have, whereas if I were to change things like the very nature of my business to avoid the fine, that could have a potential serious effect. What the court has done is demand that when Google and Meta spit on their customers, they also throw a few pennies in their change cup to show how sorry they are, while changing nothing and going full speed ahead.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#206

Post by recursive »

twoodfin wrote: post #41
strongpigeon wrote: post #12

There is a fairly low amount of details about the case in the article. This NPR article [0] has a bit more, but it's still fairly sparse. Though it's interesting how Zuckerberg thought it was a good idea to say: "If people feel like they're not having a good experience, why would they keep using the product?". Given that this is a case about addiction, that feels like a shockingly bad thing to say in defense of your…

As someone who values a liberal society, I hope we’d be exceedingly careful in what we label “addictive” in the same bucket as oxy or nicotine. I also hope the reasons are obvious.

Prohibition? Despite your hopes I'm not sure I got your intent.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#207

Post by belorn »

twoodfin wrote: post #75
jwardbond wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a neuroscientist, but I thought the actual physiological cause of addiction was similar in both nicotine and gambling: you crave the predictable release of dopamine. If that is the (heavily simplified) case, is there a distinction for you between a chemically-induced dopamine release from smoking and, say, and a button you can press that magically releases dopamine in your brain?

I don’t gamble, but if I did, I am fairly certain it would release little to no dopamine for me, win or lose. I don’t smoke, but if I did, I’m also fairly certain I would find it hard to stop.

From everything I have read about addiction, it is far from that simple. One of the best examples are pain medicine like morphine. Give opioids to patients and some will form addiction to it and others will not, and the predictors for that are both genetic and environmental. It is not as simple as inject it into person X and now they are a slave to it. One way one can see this is in statistics in that long-term opioid use occurs in about 4% of people following their use for trauma or surgery-related pain.

It not at all certain that you would find it hard to stop if you suddenly decided to try smoking. There would naturally be a risk, but how high that risk is is a debated subject if you have none of the risk factors for addictions.

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#208

Post by slibhb »

_moof wrote: post #196
slibhb wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you're comparing nicotine to Facebook really throws into sharp relief just how far from reality this whole "social media made me depressed" stuff has strayed.

There's a large body of evidence on the damage that social media can do to people, and on the engineered compulsion to use it.

[flagged]

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#209

Post by hansvm »

randycupertino wrote: post #182
Barbing wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[There are] legions of highly educated adults [at Meta] trying to increase [child] engagement Why is this not only OK but the best way for Mark to spend every waking moment of his life? Money thing? But often would he think about his bank account versus his products, maybe it’s pure drive?

I just wish for once one of these egomaniacal billionaires would actually put all their efforts and resources into solving climate change or ending world hunger. Even his medical initiative Chan-Zuckerberg biohub is a self-congratulatory shell game. I worked in the same building as them for years, literally all they did was have parties, conferences, networking events and self-congratulatory schmooze things and never…

Incentives drive outcomes, do they not? It's too easy to become a billionaire as a charlatan and too hard as somebody able to make a difference. Rather than granting Zuck nearly unlimited power and politely asking him to use it wisely if he doesn't overly mind the inconvenience, why not create a world where monsters can't have that much power in the first place?

Re: Meta and YouTube found negligent in landmark social media addiction case

#210

Post by edgyquant »

slibhb wrote: post #208
_moof wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a large body of evidence on the damage that social media can do to people, and on the engineered compulsion to use it.

[flagged]

Don’t care, the society disrupting nonsense will stop one way or another and we’re done entertaining concern trolls about the matter
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