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

theguardian.com

271–280 of 455 posts

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

#271

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?

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 don't know, are parents to blame if their kids end up drunk?

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

#272
post #197

Instagram (reels) and tiktok are truly online version of Heroine equivalent. I remember during pandemic time downloading tiktok just to see what's all the hype was about and next thing, I was wasting hours mindlessly scrolling through it. Later on same happened with reels as well. I would open the app thinking maybe just check for 15mins and time just goes by so fast and I would end-up wasting hours on it. Also, the…

To be fair- one of the interesting things about TikTok is how it rewards good commenting. It seems to bury negative commentary and reward positive commentary with the result that the comment field is generally some combination of genuinely insightful and hilarious.

TikTok comments are literally bottom of the barrel, worse than any platform I know of, way below YouTube and even X. It's a cesspool.

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

#273
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's restitution to society, for the cost of the damage done.

It is more money for the courts. Not really restitution to society. Will Facebook change its policies? No.

It is more money for the courts.

In the United States, fines don't go to the courts.

Also, the article specifies where the money goes, so clearly your invented outrage trumped your willingness to read the article.

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

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awful, I'm glad I've never actually used either platform. These companies obviously seem to be employing psychologists et. al. to figure out how to make the platforms more addictive; I can't see how they'd get it so damn right otherwise. I keep hearing people talk about it but have never seen the appeal -- it seems like a lot of dopamine-inducing content with little substance. I'll take a longer educational vi…

They absolutely use some sort of psychological hacks when designing the algorithm. Somehow it finds the correct types of videos to keep you addictive pretty fast

That's kind of the crazy part, there is no actual "psychological" tricks in the sense that they just train their recommendation algorithm to build your feed in a way that makes you spend as much time as possible (basically a glorified A/B testing on a massive scale).

With these types of algorithms, massive amount of data usually perform better than any underlying model you could have.

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

#275
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society pays the cost of mental health in reduced productivity, healthcare, accidents, homicides, etc.

Sure, but individuals pay the cost too. Society also has an obligation to make them whole or to at least give them accountability.

I suppose in the civilised world, society looks after the victims - but of course in 3rd world shit holes, they are on their own.

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

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was more about the positive outcomes from these kinds of fines, rather than about _forcing_ corporate behavior change. If corporations are going to act like psychopaths, let's at least make them pay a tax for it with fines like this.

Oh yeah for sure, I'm not suggesting the fine is bad, I'm suggesting it's insufficient. I want to "yes and" this, not replace it. Fine them, and incentivize change for them and all other businesses in the space. Fines just clearly, demonstrably don't do that. Jail time for executives would, IMO.

Bigger fines would, too. If you gain $1B by doing an action, but you have a >10% chance of a >10B fine, it's expected value is negative.

The 10% and 10B might need to be extra high to account for hyperbolic discounting, but I think we could get there just by increasing those numbers. Shortening the time from gain and fine would also help. I don't think we can get it into a single-quarter cycle, but most CEOs don't want their company bankrupted five years down the line, either.

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

#277
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read all the words. I know it's Hacker News and that's asking for a lot of emotional maturity in a thread like this but I believe in you.

You have to be mentally insane to think porn websites provide health education or that they are the only source in a conservative society for adults, and then you mention kids in the same comment. I’m not sure if you’re being edgy or just trolling.

Many of the people in the US behind attempts to ban "pornography" also classify anything involving LGBT people, including children, as pornographic. It's about the specific definition of "pornography" as it will be in the law, and that's what will matter.

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

#279

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 revenu…

this is true and the knock-on effect of this is that other states with intrepid AGs and consumer protection bureaus now have a case law example to cite in their arguments

the hope is that if other AGs pursue these measures that they do their due diligence of creating a case that FB's corporate lawyers won't be able to defeat in subsequent trials. otherwise case law will ultimately let large, unaccountable corporations like Meta win-out in perpetuity

so this is a great battle won but there's a long road ahead for the larger legal strategy. and I do hope it's very long - the current Supreme Court ideological makeup does not favor consumers or citizens at the moment and it'll take decades for the insidious work of the Federalist Society to be mitigated

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

#280
post #48

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?

Every porn site that makes money off harm to minors? Yes, and sometimes they are taken down.

I’m very interested in the “harm to minors” aspect of porn. I don’t agree or disagree, I truly don’t understand and I’d really enjoy having someone clearly explain it to me.

Where I’m stuck:

When asked, people tend to kind of hand wave and say “distorted view of sex” or similar. But what, specifically? And how does it harm them?

I’ve tried to think through the pieces myself and I can only come up with things that sound too silly to be the reason. Are we worried they’re going to discover a fetish? Is that bad because it doesn’t align with “missionary sex for the purposes of procreation”? Are we afraid they’ll pick up on the caricature representation of sex and break a leg trying to t-bone their girlfriend? Are we afraid they’ll think they need to slap their girlfriends ass far too much, then get broken up with, become a social outcast, and never get into law school? Are we afraid they’ll get overstimulated and bored with sex as a result, quit caring about hygiene and dating, which will inevitably lead to a population decline and the downfall of society?

I honestly couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound as silly as accusing king fu movies of distorting their view of fighting, which would arguably cause more harm when they try to do “crane style” and get their ass kicked.

I’m looking for the action->action link, not the “messes them up” headline.

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