Who gets the money when something like this happens?
The lawyers always win
New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
361–370 of 455 posts
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
This analysis actually understates how massive and outsized the penalties are. The court ruling only applies to children in New Mexico under age 18. New Mexico has ~450,000 people under age 18, of which roughly 140,000 are between ages 13-17 (Meta officially requires age 13+ to use their platforms). Recent Pew surveys of U.S. teens ages 13–17 show ~70% of teenagers use Instagram and ~30% use Facebook. In New Mexico,…
I am not sure if a $7k payout is sufficient for the harm it has caused. Remember some people committed suicide. Some have mental problems
This is ridiculous - you cannot attribute suicide to solely using Facebook.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
A parallel between attitudes about new technologies, does not work when the parallel between the two technologies itself is broken. I too was on slashdot, back in the early days of 5 digit/6 digit IDs. I’ve since worked in trust and safety, and contributed to research on it, and have played video games enough that it’s the “sport” I prefer. The evidence and research shows that social media is entirely different than…
I think you should talk to some real life teenagers to see how hysterical this impression is.
Oh, thats an interesting response. Perhaps something like this?
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/22/teens-social...
> Still, teens are growing more wary of social media for their peers. Roughly half of teens (48%) say these sites have a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022. But fewer (14%) think they negatively affect them personally.
What next? Maybe we should wait for the creators of social media tools to be caught on record saying that they did the tests and know it’s harmful?
However I suspect that nothing I say will shift your position.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is however a great incentive for minors to sign up to platforms.
I think it’s perfect. It means that Meta can’t have squishy hand-wavy policies to keep minors off the platform, they’ll have to do real work and build real tools to keep them off because those minors are now a potential cost-center. Alternatively, they could just stop using manipulative tactics and continue to allow minors. That’s an option available to them as well.
That's probably going to lead us to trusted attestation age verification.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
I agree about being outsiders. Social media (if this is even a well-defined term) is just how people communicate these days. No need for hysteria and banning (I was on Slashdot in the 90s. Was that not social media?). I think it’s as ignorant to want to ban kids from social media today as it was ignorant to want to ban my generation from video games 30 years ago. The kids at the time thought the adults were clueless…
How many Psychologists did Slashdot hire with the explicit task of making slashdot more addictive?
Meta has entire teams.
It's like believing that cigarettes are fine and shouldn't be specially regulated because 50 years ago everyone occasionally smoked a pipe and it wasn't that big a deal, completely ignoring how the two are incomparable, entirely because the industry made it more addictive to be more profitable
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#366Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In my experience, Instagram's comments are the worst of the worst. Can't speak on X though, since I don't use it.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're usually covered by age limit laws and also not "free" as they cost money to purchase. In what sense are they available freely to kids?
"Freely available" doesn't mean they are free of charge, but that they can be obtained at any time with minimal effort.
I don't agree that it's minimal effort for kids to get hold of cigarettes and alcohol, though it's probably not too difficult for older teens to do so.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#368A 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…
I don't disagree with anything said here, but it sure would be nice if Meta (and any other companies building social media applications) focused more on what's right for children, both short and long term, than the math of what is profitable.
The problem is that "what's right for children" should be better parental controls, and better enforcement of treating self-declared ages under 18 separately. Instead, the New Mexico AG and other assholes believe it means we need more mass surveillance, mandatory age verification, bans on encryption, and other insanity.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#369A 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 corporation…
The New Mexico AG behind this case is Raul Torrez. He's a fascist/authoritarian asshole who has been using this case to try and force mandatory online age verification on everyone while also banning encryption.
The last thing we need is for other state AGs to try to copy him.
Re: New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure if a $7k payout is sufficient for the harm it has caused. Remember some people committed suicide. Some have mental problems
This is ridiculous - you cannot attribute suicide to solely using Facebook.
The judge said it FB was a "contributor".