Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by bsenftner » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #115

hugodan wrote: post #16

still 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

Agreed. I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that ad-hoc legal action and regulations are just stop gap measures in a losing battle, and that any remedy needs to be more foundational. For example: mandate that every job description in any private corporation include a list of ethics responsibilities, and that employees may challenge management directives that in their view breach those responsibilities, and if m…

This requires critical analysis and secondary considerations to be present, if not well developed, in a critical percentage of the population. That population does not exist, and the entire motion of modern culture over the last 50 years has been to reduce the critical analysis and secondary considerations of the general public. This effort has been extremely successful too. We are at a point where the general public is questioning advanced educations at all. Eloi and Morlocks: here we come!

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

#272

Post by pbkompasz » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:05 PM UTC

jcmoscon wrote: post #55

I think worse than social media nowadays is youtube shorts. That thing is so addictive to kids. I wish there was a way to delete shorts from youtube and have only long form videos available in the app.

You need 10 million valid Shorts views just to get monetized. That's just shows how little it's worth compared to how addictive it is.

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

#273

Post by bearjaws » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:06 PM UTC

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #181

bearjaws wrote: post #158

Needs a 0 added, $160B feels fair. Mesothelioma was $35B in 90s money, so about 3x that today. Companies keep getting away with this "cost of doing business" fines, the justice department keeps failing at its duties. The fines either need to wipe out these companies to the point the share holders hold the leadership accountable or nothing will change.

The difference is asbestos clearly and directly caused harm, the social media addiction stuff stand on pretty dubious science to say the least.

The problem wasn't as simple as it caused harm, it was the companies knew it caused harm and did nothing.

Just like how Meta, it's staff and leadership all knew they were making decisions that harmed people, and did nothing to stop it while profiting immensely.

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

#274

Post by carljungslabtek » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

tiahura wrote: post #193

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "America defaults to free. That's very unsettling for those that an authoritarian approach." The least insane general position is to always ask "Free for who to do what?" Freedom for you to try cocaine if you want? Ok, let's consider it, but let's have a serious discussion about public health and safety first because there are predictable public consequences to broader society. Freedom for someone to put cocaine in…

The general proposition is that the default for freedom is strongest regarding communication.

Using dark UX patterns to get people hooked on your product isn’t “communication”. The product may contain communication but nobody is saying instagram and facebook shouldn’t be able to exist as communication platforms.

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

#275

Post by intended » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

phyzix5761 wrote: post #157

NalNezumi wrote: post #123

>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?

Nope.

in more detail: Largely no.

Theres many ways to explain this, but this is the shortest: You have an average person, with a phone.

This person, with their average life experience, average brain development and biology, is facing off against research programs, data analysis, engineering teams, product designers, financiers, operations teams, who all want to give them the best digital experience they possible can have.

The algorithms are A/B tested to as close as possible, the content is generated from a dog-eat-dog creator economy that finds the most distracting methods to grab your attention.

A good part of this is because our society has never had to deal with information technology of this scope and scale. Quantity is its own quality. As a result people never had support and the firms had carte blanche.

It took us decades to go from the Libertarian ideal of "More speech is free speech" to knowing that content moderation is required to have functional online communities.

Do individuals have free will and choice? Yes.

Are people going to respond to incentives? yes.

Are people going to be able to compete fairly against a far more resourced claimaint for their attention and money? No.

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

#276

Post by pas » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:07 PM UTC

phyzix5761 wrote: post #157

NalNezumi wrote: post #123

>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?

HN is also social media :)

but let's say friends sending links to group chats (or through direct messages) and you open it, and uh you see you got messages from other people on Instagram, or on Facebook you see that someone had a baby/wedding/whatever, and ...

also I see that people install these limiter apps on their phones, and then just override them many times a day.

and of course if every few days you spend 30 minutes giggling while looking at funny cats/dogs, sure, great. but on bad days you end up doing it for hours and escaping into it, ignoring something else, or using it after stressful meetings to "clear my head" (which becomes a coping mechanism for anxiety)

the problem is obviously (right?) that this happens to everybody. kids are probably more susceptible, but in general we withdrew into our screens and do our flight/fight/fawn/freeze responses online (videogames, outrage porn, porn porn, food porn)

https://www.slowboring.com/p/from-bowling-alone-to-scrolling...

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

#277

Post by dismalaf » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:09 PM UTC

shepardrtc wrote: post #106

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 has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.

As someone who graduated high school just before Facebook became a thing: it's always been like this. For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram just meant you could now seek affirmation from a larger community than your local community.

While there's definitely some harm with social media (comparing yourself to a perfectly curated profile) there's also plenty of benefits (it's democratized advertising, news, made it easier for small businesses to reach customers, etc...).

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

#278

Post by toofy » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:10 PM UTC

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #185

toofy wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who is pretending this? the two scenarios below are not the same. surely you see this, right? scenario 1: some interesting chemicals exist in a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa. scenario 2: a person picks up some interesting chemicals from a warehouse in the middle of a cornfield in iowa, compiles some of them into highly addictive packaging, brings them to a child’s room in phoenix, pokes the kid to tr…

> who is pretending this? The comment I’m replying to: > still feels like they got away easy for raping children's minds

i don’t think you read my comment.

the situation you put forth and the situation in reality are two entirely different outcomes.

removing a bunch of relevant context doesn’t magically make them the same thing.

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

#279

Post by intended » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:11 PM UTC

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #163

left-struck wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s interesting that you bring up wrongthink. Banning free speech would be something like out of 1984, but what we have is far more subtle and insidious. A system that shows you only what it wants you to see, while tricking you into thinking you’re seeing what you want to see. Anyway, you can support free speech while hating this algorithm crap at the same time.

The system isn't tricking anyone, if an individual is not aware of how social media algorithms work that is due to willful ignorance (in the case of children that falls on the parents willful ignorance). I do personally believe banning the algorithms begins to fall into the realm of free speech regulation. I can hate the algorithm crap without thinking the government should regulate the internet.

Except that is an ideological position that has zip to do with the realities of how speech and ideas actuall move in online spaces.

In the starkest of terms: Americans have to somehow reconcile faith in the power of an invidual's freedom of speech and the manipulation of the collective marketplace of ideas.

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

#280

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Wed, Aug 26, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

thinkingtoilet wrote: post #262

doctorpangloss wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember being a zombie nephew, although back in those days it was the Game Boy that purportedly fried my brain. (It was entirely normal, of course, for the uncle who told me that to then leave the conversation and retreat to his armchair for his daily 3 hours of baseball watching; that's sports, you can't fry your brain with sports!)