Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 454 posts

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#101

Post by aprilthird2021 »

bandrami wrote: post #99
qwe----3 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?

Meta (née Facebook) hired addiction medicine specialists to work on their platform engagement. It wasn't to make teens use their platforms less .

But, to be fair, many companies hire organizational psychologists and other such people to make their products addictive and to understand exactly how to make the most money on you and get the most time from you. Even the rewards program at the grocery store near you is tailored in such a way to maximally please you and keep you shopping there

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#102

Post by intended »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #101
bandrami wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta (née Facebook) hired addiction medicine specialists to work on their platform engagement. It wasn't to make teens use their platforms less .

But, to be fair, many companies hire organizational psychologists and other such people to make their products addictive and to understand exactly how to make the most money on you and get the most time from you. Even the rewards program at the grocery store near you is tailored in such a way to maximally please you and keep you shopping there

Many companies got regulated to hell and back, as a result.

There are no meth companies, the cigarette industry is regulated as far as we can take it, opiates and medication is regulated with punitive damages levied (once evidence passes a threshold). Gambling is highly regulated (and prediction markets will be as well, eventually)

I don’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe even reward programs will have regulations surrounding them.

Above all else: What we did with social media, lootboxes and phones, was unprecedented.

The safety people brought up the issues in the firms, and the final decision that had to be taken was to ensure shareholder returns.

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#103

Post by arjie »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #43
sneak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are of course free to not view it. Why do you think that you should decide for others what they should view? How do you know better than they do, what they should or should not be viewing?

As I got older I began to recognize that some things are just bad for society at large. My refraining from a thing doesn't fix the societal ill the thing causes.

I suspect this view is actually the majority. Chat Control, the Great Firewall, Indian VoIP control, the Spanish Cloudflare ban and so on point to many societies finding that many things are just bad for society at large. We’re all just fighting over what things are just bad for society at large.

In the US, the first amendment exists but in Germany simply displaying the flag of the Nazi party is illegal. The latter have determined that it’s just bad for society at large. In El Salvador, tattoos on a man are just bad for society at large.

It’s true that refraining does not actually solve the problem. Others must be constrained. Sometimes for their own good and other times for the sake of society.

Personally, I like the way the US is setup but what is truly adaptive isn’t clear to me. Perhaps indeed it is good that one is bone sawed because the things one is saying are just bad for society at large and I should support that whether or not I have said those things.

Only time will tell. I just hope I have some place to live that has something like the First Amendment and that has some of the freewheeling life of the US. Maybe I will only have that if I defend it and if I fail to then by its defeat it will have proven its maladaptive nature.

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#104

Post by tmp10423288442 »

majorchord wrote: post #3

I wonder how many billions it would take every year for this to not just be considered "cost of doing business"?

This is a lot of money for just New Mexico - they only have a population a little more than 2 million.

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#105

Post by JoshTko »

nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #13
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the "slap on the wrist, don't do it again". A future judge will not be so kind if they keep doing it. Being punitive the first time is unwise because it invites abuse by others seeking an advantage.

> Being punitive the first time is unwise I'm not so sure this is the first time. 100th, maybe. Hmm, idk why the downvotes. Maybe from people who don't know how to use google? Took me 5 seconds to find several more from this year alone. 2026: https://apnews.com/article/meta-court-ruling-mental-health-o... 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/24/meta-new-... How many more "first times" shall we give t…

prolly bots and meta employees

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#106

Post by gmerc »

qwe----3 wrote: post #12
tristanj wrote: post #5

Per the court ruling [0], the specific law that Meta violated was New Mexico’s public-nuisance law, NMSA 1978 § 30-8-1. The relevant section that was violated is [1]: A public nuisance consists of knowingly creating, performing or maintaining anything affecting any number of citizens without lawful authority which is either: - A. injurious to public health, safety, morals or welfare; or - B. interferes with the exerc…

These rulings are stupid and if generalized would make doing business impossible. Parents should parent their kids. That law is so board - "public morals"? Should every porn site be taken down?

Maybe this business should be impossible. Why should it be possible?

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#107

Post by wraptile »

drivebyhooting wrote: post #9

What benefit do kids draw from instagram and facebook?

It's sad we view social media so negatively these days when it should be incredible tool for both personal and social growth. I grew up with irc and reddit, and it was incredibly useful for me not only find like-minded people but to learn that there's more to life than my small town, there are a variety of different people, ideas and careers out there.

Sadly the new generation of networks grew in a different direction but all of this still exists, and it's incredibly disingenuous to say that "there are no benefits for kids". There's still a community for any subject on both Facebook and Instagram except it's all buried under spam and bad intentions.

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#108

Post by intended »

gms wrote: post #92
drivebyhooting wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can I parent my kids when every child in the school is a social media addict? If heroin were commonplace and available in every kid’s pockets would parents be to blame then too?

I know many parents who manage this fine, I don't see why you can't: 1. You control whether your child has a phone and how much they are allowed to use it (Apple provides all sorts of controls for parents). 2. Every child in the school is not an addict. This is (for lack of a better term) a boomer view of the world.

Sure you can argue the nuances, however this is missing the forest for the trees.

Children don’t grow up in a vacuum. They see how their peers operate, what they talk about, what they are playing with.

Not being able to do that marks you as an outsider.

And when the “toys” we are talking about are phones, video games, and social media, it isn’t just a question of a one off argument or rule.

I have seen a 1 year old, whose parents keep him away from screens and tech, get hypnotized by swiping the screen of an Apple Watch on his aunt’s hand.

SV and Tech had the most money, most people, and the ability to test and scale every idea to figure out what would enrapture adult human brains.

This is not any sort of fair fight. A competition where the old approaches to family and child rearing win against the Tech that has been created.

Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

#109

Post by tmp10423288442 »

A lot of people on this story are making the usual snarky remarks that, oh, this is just a slap on the wrist—some trivial proportion of Meta’s global revenue. And that is true, but unlike the EU, for example, New Mexico is a tiny jurisdiction. It only has a little bit more than 2 million people.

So actually, a fine—or a judgment—of $942 million that applies just to New Mexico is enormous. If you look at Meta’s revenue from the U.S. and Canada and assign it proportionally by population, you find that Meta only earned about $1.5 billion to $2 billion total from New Mexico over the past five years. The exact figure depends on whether you allocate purely by population or account for purchasing power, which makes the estimate a little lower because New Mexico is a poorer state than the U.S. average.

Given that, the judgment is a half to two-thirds of what Meta could have obtained from New Mexico. So it is actually a serious deterrent, assuming Meta thinks New Mexico would continue to impose fines of that size.

I also think that there’s a good chance this judgment gets overturned or significantly reduced on appeal, but even if the fine drops to half its current level, it would be proportionately larger than almost any fine against any company, let alone tech, that I’ve heard of.

Post reply on HN