Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children • Hacker News Board

Re: Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

#81

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

aspenmartin wrote: post #60

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick is to cut away at the user-hostile foundations of the product. In theory, a product like Facebook or Instagram would have no need to be regulated, but the sale of user data, the engineered addictiveness (looking at you “Data Scientists”), etc. are all worthy of being regulated.

by your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol. But also I think people forget: this is not cut and dried. This is not simple. This is not just "these companies are evil and should be stopped". It is: there is a market pressure to do these things. "I enjoy the product and use it a lot" and "I am addicted" is blurry and market pressure is not going to recognize that limit because i…

> by your username I assume you are yourself one of the droids you're looking for lol.

Aside from a 6 month contracting stint, I’ve never worked on data related to humans, only machines. No payment data, no behavioral data, no website data. The closest I’ve come is human-provided labels.

I’ve probably made only 50% of my total earning potential compared to Data Scientists / ML Engineers who work in the advertising and retail spaces (Google, Meta, Amazon), but at least I can look my children in the eyes and tell them that I didn’t sell my soul for a dollar.

> My hope is that there is a way to do both and I don't have to be constantly horrified when I look at my screen time hours.

Same, but without regulations there exists no incentive for any corporation to care about whether you’re addicted to your screen. And engagement, positive or negative, only makes them richer.

Re: Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

#82

Post by snickerbockers » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:56 PM UTC

cyanydeez wrote: post #79

snickerbockers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice fedslop but teddy k was never given any drugs. Im glad you agree with me on the stuff about Facebook being evil. im not sure i understand why you said this was not a conspiracy immediately after describing a series of events perpetrated by facebook which could easily form the basis of a criminal conspiracy prosecution.

associating a well researched and backed claim about facebooks harm with a poorly done research about drugs and mind control by intelligence services since discredited and made apop culture meme does not aid in taking down facebook. its a bizarre association that looks purely like grafting the two as things only nutjobs would consider. in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and i…

>since discredited

LMAO what are you even talking about? MKULTRA is a historical fact. The CIA even admits it was real. You can't just handwave something away by calling it "discredited".

There have been congressional hearings and documents produced from it. The only reason it's poorly documented is because the CIA illegally destroyed its own documentation. The little documentation we do have was produced after the CIA said it had already destroyed all of its own documentation to prevent its employees from ever complying with congressional subpoena. They have lied at every step, and even if they were telling the truth they would still be violating the law with an aim towards covering it up.

>in reality, facebooks effects on its users has at least a decade of academic and independent research both commissioned by facebook and in spite of them.

thats my point. For at least a decade they have been doing the same sort of thing MKULTRA was doing. I explicitly said in my first post that there's no hard evidence that there was a relation between the two but the similarity is striking, especially since it is well documented that Facebook regularly colludes with the United States federal government. If you aren't open to even considering that it's not a coincidence then you're either a shill, an LLM, or an idiot.

Re: Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

#83

Post by Bratmon » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 10:03 PM UTC

nixon_why69 wrote: post #80

Bratmon wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely curious how you imagine this system working without a government bureaucracy keeping track of the values of all cargos and regularly inspecting ships to verify the accuracy of their manifests. What stops ships from reporting something like "Wheat - 25 guilders per ton" when they're actually carrying diamonds? It doesn't even solve the "It's hard for the bureaucracy to know how much stuff is worth" probl…

The story is from the 15-1600s. I imagine it working like things generally worked in that time period which is with quite a lot less bureaucracy than today. The cleverness of the idea is it leverages fear to prevent ships from declaring "wheat" for their ship full of diamonds. You can make some sporadic, random inspections, just enough to keep the fear up, instead of having to inspect every single ship.

The idea of "Wait, we can just make sporadic random customs inspections" is way older than this law. I suspect it was invented by the first ever customs inspector. (At a minimum, Plutarch at one point described it happening at a checkpoint between Roman provinces)

Re: Meta loses bid to dismiss US states' claims that FB, Instagram addict children

#84

Post by Bratmon » Fri, Jul 03, 2026, 7:59 PM UTC

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #67

Sometimes there are HN comment complaining about articles reporting on legal proceedings that fail to include URLs pointing to the documents referenced. No complaints in this thread so far Here is the order denying Meta's motion to dismiss https://ia803204.us.archive.org/15/items/gov.uscourts.cand.4...

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