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Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

reuters.com

261–270 of 510 posts

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#261

Meta 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 is capitalism. You're talking about capitalism.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#262

Meta 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…

when florida banned phones from schools, a gold-standard causation study found a benefit of 0.9 percentiles on standardized tests between students who were under the ban and those who could use phones freely. this is about the same impact as studying for a standardized test for 1 hour. we have had a lot of chances to study this stuff, and the results - like the teen sleep study and the teen wellness studies, both con…

There are of course bigger threats, but have you ever talked to one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone? My nephew is one. He has the thousand yard stare, can barely have a conversation, and has no ability to do anything off his phone. Of course, it's not everyone, but the effects of phone use are beyond obvious and clearly destructive.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#263
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible." Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly. Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box…

> The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible." The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.

Some nations have great laws that deal with lootboxes. I beleive one approach is making odds known, and another is simply placing fines on firms that use loot box mechanics.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.

Have they? I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship. But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.

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Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#265
Solution is not to have another app that is built on likes, nor on feeds. We have seen, even for adults the apps built to constrain the use of social media apps and devices are ineffective. Only way forward is to create opportunities for real time, conversations that are not chat based. It has also shown that people are less mean, when interacting in real time with a human as opposed to writing a short comment. Especially in US, where defaults are system are creating more walls between people, instead of creating more opportunities to interact in real time. People sit in car, from there isolated single family homes, and go to their destination mostly that way. There is no spontaneous opportunities to mingle with the neighbors, nor with new people at train stations or at town square. I built https://tosynch.com to do one thing, and one thing only : reconnect with friends and meet often. No likes, no feeds, no ads, no noisy notifications, setup and forget.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#266
It's kind of funny that Facebook tried to launder its brand by renaming itself Meta, and its vile reputation is haunting that brand now too. New name is so abstract is sounds vaguely dystopian.

Not sure that it matters though, because Instagram and WhatsApp are still in everyone's pockets. Even in hippie circles, they're almost mandatory to stay connected.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#267
post #40
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>[irreparably damaging] children's minds I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.

What's he gonna do? There is no "enough" with some personalities, there is only "more".

That’s a serious mental problem.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#268
post #233
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used. I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....

Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just another anti-Trump conspiracy theory?

> Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands...and your plan is to blackmail this person? [pauses, smiles] Good luck.

Re: Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strawman, no one said anything about shutting down the company. Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.

The market is telling them they need to make number go up. Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits. This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers. They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less com…

Precisely, this is the point. There is systemic misalignment that encourages companies to behave this way.
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