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Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

the-independent.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#51

Post by 999900000999 »

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#52

Post by edwcross »

austin-cheney wrote: post #47
imglorp wrote: post #27

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.

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?

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#53

Post by SirMaster »

mapleoin wrote: post #6
the_real_cher wrote: post #2

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.

> 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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#54

Post by kridsdale1 »

imglorp wrote: post #27

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#55

Post by netsharc »

edwcross wrote: post #52
austin-cheney wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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)...

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#56

Post by 55555 »

Grombobulous wrote: post #19

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.

$423 billion*

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#57

Post by johng »

999900000999 wrote: post #51

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…

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.)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#58

Post by jmyeet »

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.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#59

Post by nradov »

ceejayoz wrote: post #25
amelius wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.
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