It is sad but inevitable in a free market. The line between a good and an addictive product is often blur. OK, cocaine is addictive and a nice restaurant meal is good but everything else lies inbetween. In the end, I believe after 3-5 year Meta will pay 1.4 billions instead of trillions and 'business as usual'.
Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
141–150 of 194 posts
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#142Earlier 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?
Facebook chose that business model. It wasn't forced on it. The terrible thing about social media is that has real utility. If you take away the addictive optimisation and surveillance and leave the local networking, forums, discussion groups, and small sales and basic ads you still have a very viable business - somewhat smaller, but still wildly successful. But the point of Facebook is surveillance and belief/behavi…
Nearly everybody is already aware, but some people choose to use Facebook anyways. That is their choice.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#143It is sad but inevitable in a free market. The line between a good and an addictive product is often blur. OK, cocaine is addictive and a nice restaurant meal is good but everything else lies inbetween. In the end, I believe after 3-5 year Meta will pay 1.4 billions instead of trillions and 'business as usual'.
But we don’t live in libertarian dystopias and do regulate markets. We don’t have to accept that type of behavior from company leadership
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They made them a specific way, and will be stained with the consequences, because they were cowards who took the easy way out. One thing I've gotten tired of as I've gotten older is self-righteous judgement like that, when directed at the rank-and-file. Your assignment: carefully inspect your life, and enumerate all the things which you are "stained with the consequences, because [you] were [a] coward who took the…
‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason. What do you think that actually looks like? The same damn thing. What do you think the scientists working at big tobacco said to themselves? The same damn thing. The system won’t work without the ‘little people’ doing all the day to day. This is, quite literally, the ‘banality of evil’.
> ‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason.
For things like murdering people and genocide. When you're talking about controversial/gray areas, where there is no crime or clear consensus on punishable immorality, then no.
Expand that concept too far, too zealously, and you might as well shoot everyone because everyone's guilty. The world ain't black and white.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#145We look back on the (at the time influential) claim that rock/metal/etc "corrupts the youth" as a quaint moral panic. Modern views about social media are our version of that same silly claim. Future people will look back on all these comments comparing Facebook to crack with the same amused bewilderment as we look back on the PMRC.
Indeed it would be silly to prosecute the record execs because they found a report called "what are the youths listening to" or even with the video game moral panic of the 90s, going after game companies because they found a report titled "Is Laura Croft setting unrealistic beauty standards for teens" at gamedev companies
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#146Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives. Our system can…
A true acolyte of the Church of Too Big To Fail speaks up...
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#147Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
I'd settle for corporate jail time. No more profiting off illegal activity when the fine is less than profit. Nope, corporate jail. All operations have to stop for your sentence. No sales, no product development, no operations. Maybe an outside team of accountants can be allowed to run your books. This would effectively be a death sentence for many companies, but at least it mirrors the experience humans have to endure - loss of job, family loss of income, loss of ability to get future employment, etc.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#148Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.
That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives. Our system can…
I don't think the poster meant applying the death penalty to the corporation.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Those leaders own full responsibility for this. Sorry, no free pass. No doubt there's lots of decent people working at FB. But through their work they do support a company with questionable ethics. Same goes for FB users. Not judging any of FB's employees (or users) here! But unless you're starving or someone's whipping you, you have a choice to go elsewhere.
We shouldn't blame people who work in companies making harmful decisions. Employees are not in a position of strength and should not feel responsible for choosing employment that helps them maximize their wealth. It's the government's responsibility to control the employers.
> Employees are not in a position of strength
Employees that are paid multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars plus equity, and likely can jump ship to another company without a hitch are not in a position of strength?
Please. Meta is one of the few firms where employees genuinely had a chance to stop this from happening, with all the "engineers are first-class citizens" bit.
I'd rather people own up to their responsibilities than dodge around theoretical nonsense.
Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason. What do you think that actually looks like? The same damn thing. What do you think the scientists working at big tobacco said to themselves? The same damn thing. The system won’t work without the ‘little people’ doing all the day to day. This is, quite literally, the ‘banality of evil’.
> ‘Just following orders’ is derided for a reason. For things like murdering people and genocide. When you're talking about controversial/gray areas, where there is no crime or clear consensus on punishable immorality, then no . Expand that concept too far, too zealously, and you might as well shoot everyone because everyone's guilty. The world ain't black and white.
Facebook’s algorithms have quite literally caused that. Nearly a decade ago. And haven’t much improved.
And is clearly (with many, many studies on the topic over a decade plus) behind the rise of right wing nationalism and the fraying social contract.
Zuck is very, very aware of this - as leaked emails show. He knows, but continues anyway, and anyone at Meta at this point who also doesn’t know is being willfully ignorant.
This is the ‘cigarettes don’t cause cancer’ argument.