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Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

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Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#111

Post by CrazyStat »

ed312 wrote: post #94
rokkamokka wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hundred million identical court cases might not be too good for the legal system

1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages? <-- maybe it makes sense for large corporations to carry insurance to pay for the potentially massive legal costs they could impose on governments? 2. Shouldn't we be able to quickly resolve these cases assuming there are no substantially different pieces of evidence?

> 1. Why should harming a million people identically reduce their right to a fair legal evaluation and possibly compensation for damages?

It doesn’t. You can almost[1] always opt out of class action lawsuits to pursue your own suit. This would be expensive and unwise for most people, but you have right.

[1] There are rare exceptions.

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#112

Post by deeponey »

LocalH wrote: post #105
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Throwing the baby out with the bathwater? I believe we need to strengthen 230, but with the added caveat that affected platform owners must stop gaming the algorithms, that it must require user-driven curation. Let me curate my own feed, stop shoving shit in front of my eyes. When you do so, you're making heavy editorial decisions, and should be open to liability.

This is really the essence of it. Section 230 is critical to a healthy internet, but there is large grey area between editorial and platform. Places like youtube, meta, X, etc. are pretending to be platforms when really they are algorithmic editors, gatekeepers, and curators. They are much more like traditional media newspapers than say your ISP, and they need to be treated as such.

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#114

Post by PaulHoule »

mrwh wrote: post #21

Meta wants to be an impartial platform only and exactly when it suits them to be.

Wow.

Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him?

Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it.

It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you an email asking if they could come around and pick up a Q.P. next Saturday I'd expect you to give the person a correction in person that they shouldn't do that again.

Not to say you should be like Epstein but I mean he and the people he corresponded with had some sense so there is is very little evidence of criminal activity in millions of emails.

At Facebook on the other hand all the time people sent emails about things that could just as easily been left as "dark matter" unexplained and minimally documented decisions but no it is like that M.F. Doom song "Rapp Snitch Knishes", like a bunch of children or something with no common sense at all.

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#115

Post by rurp »

Xeoncross wrote: post #75

As an aside, class-action lawsuits seem less than ideal for the public. The awards benefit the lawyers and perhaps a small handful, but the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05. In addition, successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue. Individuals bringing their own lawsuits seems like it would affect better change as 1) the award money would be better distributed instea…

How does this address the most common case where many people were harmed a modest amount? Causing $100 of harm to a million people is a huge amount of damage that should be punished, but nobody is going to launch a full independent lawsuit for $100.

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#116

Post by epistasis »

Pxtl wrote: post #102
epistasis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago this seemed a bit too extreme for me. Now, with the web mostly burned down anyway, I see little to lose and lots to gain in a section 230 repeal. My, how the Overton Window changes on some ideas. And when it's changing on some things it tends to accelerate on others too, like a social momentum on reconsidering past norms.

My compromise pitch, since the "You need ID from your users" ship has sailed: Companies are not liable if they have proper ID of the person who submitted the content and can provide that to a plaintiff. If they have not made a good-faith effort to know who submitted this info (like taking ID, not just an email address) then they're taking responsibility for the submitted content. Which means sites that have responsib…

> Which means sites that have responsible moderation can still allow anonymous contributions.

Anonymous contributions, up to the point of somebody compromising the service? With the quantity of password hash thefts, I suspect we'll see even more ID thefts this way.

I can't imagine using any service that asks for ID, except perhaps from the well-established giants, so an exception for identifiability would effectively be a gigantic moat granted to the largest internet companies to keep out competition. Anything like that would need to be paired with massive anti-trust changes, as well as perhaps government take-over of the giants as utilities, none of which sounds very appealing...

That said, don't take any of my rambling as discouragement, your type of thinking is exactly what we need, we need massive amounts of policy discussion and your suggestion is very innovative.

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#117

Post by bityard »

Xeoncross wrote: post #75

As an aside, class-action lawsuits seem less than ideal for the public. The awards benefit the lawyers and perhaps a small handful, but the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05. In addition, successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue. Individuals bringing their own lawsuits seems like it would affect better change as 1) the award money would be better distributed instea…

> successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue.

Only if you don't opt out. Individuals who opt out of being part of the class can still file their own suits. (Although it's not clear how successful you will be if your situation/harm is not substantially different from the other members of the class.)

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#118

Post by Lord_Zero »

PaulHoule wrote: post #114
mrwh wrote: post #21

Meta wants to be an impartial platform only and exactly when it suits them to be.

Wow. Does Zuckerberg have some kind of clinical condition where he just can't imagine how other people might see him? Sure this will slow down the personal injury lawyers finding clients but it won't stop them, meantime it is more ammunition for Facebook's enemies to use against it. It is one thing to do shady business, it is another thing to incriminate yourself. If you were involved with weed and somebody sent you…

Damn whos buying a Q.P.??

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#119

Post by wongarsu »

rokkamokka wrote: post #77
Xeoncross wrote: post #75

As an aside, class-action lawsuits seem less than ideal for the public. The awards benefit the lawyers and perhaps a small handful, but the actual plaintiffs only get $0.05. In addition, successful class-action suits prevent further litigation from being allowed for the same issue. Individuals bringing their own lawsuits seems like it would affect better change as 1) the award money would be better distributed instea…

A hundred million identical court cases might not be too good for the legal system

Isn't that trivially fixed by raising court costs (that should go to whoever loses the suit) to cover the cost of judges, jury, admin expenses etc? I don't get the impression that this would make the justice system that much more prohibitively expensive than it already is, and would allow the legal system to scale to the case load

Re: Meta removes ads for social media addiction litigation

#120

Post by adi_kurian »

akersten wrote: post #88
pixl97 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tobacco lawyers "Putting that cigarettes are harmful on the box would be devastating to our profits!"

It would be a better analogy if tobacco companies sold ad space on their packs and chose not to do business with a private for-profit anti-smoking solicitation group.

No it would not. Meta is an advertising company that sells ad space. More specifically, Meta is the dominant firm in the social advertising market which is an oligopoly.

It is "the business", not an imagined side revenue stream.

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