Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
1–10 of 23 posts
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#2Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things.
1) bloated wealth by the asset holder.
2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom.
Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta shitcanned it, to avoid cost, and now sits on 2) because what it did subsequently is worse and it doesn't want to admit the cost.
Conflating this with some presumed free speech/libertarian issue is smoke-and-mirrors. This is a T&C space, it is not a free speech venue (nor is X, or Reddit) And the meta people who could editorially remove content don't but have not lost their editorial responsibility which they exercise at other times, and in ways which show they can remove content at will.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#3Hyperbolic downside risk only exists because of the combination of two things. 1) bloated wealth by the asset holder. 2) persisting refusal to countenance any kind of responsibility for their actions operating a fiefdom. Meta had content review by humans. It worked, badly, but better than the automata. It had massive PTSD risks to the operators, it was costly, and it ate into profits which affected 1) above. So Meta…
Meta AI Labs seems? Having problem?
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#4Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#5They are right, it's too much.
Let's reduce it to $1.39T. A company with 10 billion in market cap is still pretty big.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#6> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.”
Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before.
This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#7> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.” Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before. This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away when the rates dropped.
As far as the corporate tax rate, the top marginal rate was 46% in the early 80s and dropped to 34% after the Tax Reform Act of 1986.
Accuracy aside, the big problem with your comment is that you're conflating consumer protection with tax rates. You can make all sorts of legitimate arguments about the wealth situation in the world today but let's first acknowledge that not every profit-making company engages in the type of despicable behavior Facebook has.
If corporations were taxed at 90%, you'd see mass conversions to pass-through entities, profit-shifting (moving to overseas domiciles) and capital flight, massive deductible spending to zero out taxable income, a huge drop in domestic investment, a huge increase in debt financing, and so on.
Corporate tax is not meant to be punish businesses for harmful actions they might theoretically engage in. That's what the tort system is for, and even then, the system is primarily compensatory with punitive damages reserved for egregious conduct.
So we don't need to use tax to stop Zuck from Zucking. We need the tort system to work and, arguably, stronger consumer protection laws that acknowledge the harms of these products much the way we eventually acknowledged the harms of products like cigarettes.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#8> a figure the tech giant blasted as “outlandish.” Conforming to society's expectations can feel outlandish if you've never been subject to it before. This is why Reagan-era 90+% top marginal income tax and strong antitrust measures are important - it prevents companies getting to the point when it feels "outlandish" to them to be punished for trying to destroy the society that granted them their wealth.
First, for accuracy: the personal top marginal income tax rate during the Reagan-era was not 90%. When Reagan took office, it was 70%, which is where it had been since the 1960s. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 dropped it to 50% and when he left office it was at 28%. Basically nobody actually paid the top marginal rate because there were so many exclusions, deductions and shelters. Many of the biggest went away…
Very sensible comment from HN after a long time as it became reddit-lite.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#9Good. The goal of tech and services is to save the user time, not waste it, social media and AI chatbots are fraudulent. In Rome if you did this you would get Infamia.
Re: Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case
#10> A sanction of that size has no analog in the history of consumer protection enforcement
The Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement provided for "$206 billion over 25 years" starting in 1998 [1]. Inflation adjusted, those cash flows are about $313bn today.
"In 1998, 24.1% of adults were current smokers" [2]. Today, 50% of U.S. adults say they use Instagram, 71% Facebook [3]. Scale up the tobacco settlement to Instagram use and you get $626bn. Scale it up to Facebook and you get $922bn. Add them together and what do you know, we're well past $1.4 trillion.
Also, let's be clear, fining Meta $1.4 trillion doesn't disappear Facebook. It probably doesn't even mean it goes bankrupt. It means current shareholders, including Mark Zuckerberg, lose control. Hell, Meta's lawyers are making a better case for this litigation than the state AGs are.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco_Master_Settlement_Agre...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4939a1.htm
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/11/20/americans-so...