"just cost of doing business." - some Meta boardroom.
Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
201–210 of 497 posts
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#202Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation. No amount of money can fix that or punish them. I think that sharing things can be wonderful, but monetizing that or adding Like counts to gamify it is very damaging to people. This idea that everyone should know better and take a ideological stand against some dumb app is ridiculous. Life can be hard at times, and these apps manipulated t…
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation. No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into vi…
> No, Meta just amplified
No. "Just" is understating the effect.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation. No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into vi…
I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent. Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many p…
>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#204Why not just ban the engagement algorithm completely. Adults are just as susceptible to addiction.
what is "the engagement algorithm"?
Not GP, but I'd define it as anything which presents or orders/prioritizes user-generated content based on preferences not explicitly specified by the consuming user. That'd be something like "default to chronological friends-and-follows-only, with an option for friends-of-friends and an option for 'most liked within a time window', and (if Facebook is feeling magnanimous to a very few power users) a preference pane which allows controlling overrides to the chronological-ness like 'show posts up to X hours out of order if they have more than Y likes'". No recommendation/you-might-also-like system, but you can make the "accounts friended/followed by" button for a user's existing friends/follows as big as you like--so long as the list presented is only sortable only by name/follower count/date-added.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#205>Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children who use Facebook and Instagram, and enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content So meta won. The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cig…
As someone who doesn't use social media please explain. Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them? Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local only posts updates on so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO.
I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#206still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds "Meta has long argued it could not have misled consumers about whether its services were addictive because "social media addiction" is not a recognized psychiatric condition." that's a nice escape hatch, considering that they are using all the tricks in the book (from online gambling, etc) and then some
This is a massive gift to FB. $17B paid is a few weeks of revenue and a single quarter’s worth of profit. But even worse, this is paid out over 10 years! A billion dollars per year to eliminate this major risk is an absolute gift from the AGs. They’re cowards who should be ashamed.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation. No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into vi…
This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have” . And I personally find it to be a very lame excuse. Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.
>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#208There is part of me who would love to see the style of internet created by companies like Meta regulated out of existence but the logical part of my mind recognizes this could lead to things like age verification laws, online surveillance and other much worse government controls over the internet.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#209>Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children who use Facebook and Instagram, and enhance measures to prevent children from accessing age-restricted content So meta won. The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media. Let me remove infinite scroll on Instagram and don't show me things I have explicitly followed on Facebook. And do this setting by default and a cig…
> The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media
Filter-tipped instead of unfiltered cigarettes basically.
Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Figure his own mental steelmans are legitimately more complex, though. And more faulty.
Some popular ones: * The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit * Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now. Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis: * Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narc…
You're being very kind and generous with the benefit of the doubt, like he even needs his own mental steelman.
For most of these ultrawealthy execs, I don't think it's even that moderately complex, and I don't think they really try to rationalize it to themselves. All they know in life is "number must go up" so that's all they really care about. In their positions, they don't have to listen to anyone but shareholders, and all shareholders care about is "number must go up." Some of them have PR people who sit there writing speeches that rationalize what they do in terms of some kind of nebulous good, but when they're done mouthing the words, they go back to their dashboards and all they are really working on is the numbers and making them go up.