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Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

the-independent.com

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#181

Post by ethbr1 »

Anonbrit wrote: post #160
ethbr1 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Sackler family ultimately had to pay $6.5b of ~$10b they took out of the Purdue Pharma in its last decade of control. It'd be more than fair that Zuckerberg has to pay 65% of his personal wealth gained by preying on adolescent insecurities. And anyone else who was in a leadership role at Meta. The deterrent is not allowing "Oops, I created a bad social outcome, but I'm keeping the profit I made from it" to be a v…

Yet we still have tobacco and vape companies

Cigarette companies who as part of the 1998 MSA (1) are banned from television and radio advertising, (2) are banned from outdoor and transit ads, and (3) have print media, retail displays, and sponsorships federally regulated.

Most of these regulations apply to vapes, if they're owned by a legacy MSA cigarette company. With more regulation teed up for the new vape companies (i.e. JUUL youth marketing lawsuits).

If we treat social media companies like tobacco companies, I'd be perfectly happy.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#182

Post by bluefirebrand »

karahime wrote: post #180
bluefirebrand wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to keep people engaged on your 30 minute long news segment is a lot different than trying to keep them engaged every free waking moment they have

News is famously 24 hours, and will always tell you to tune in at 8/9/10 PM to find out why the country is in a shambles/your home is under attack/the aliens are coming to abduct you.

24 hour news is really just the same 1 hour repeated 24 times though, it's kinda not the same

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#183

Post by eli »

intended wrote: post #91
eli wrote: post #64

These types of lawsuits seem dangerous. But Meta is a pretty awful company and deserves some sort of comeuppance. I worry about what it leads to though. Hard cases make bad laws.

They are difficult lawsuits for sure! But that is because the status quo is already messed up. These cases are going to bring up questions on content moderation, engagement, ad revenue, age verification, and a whole host of insane things that people don’t want to think about.

I think a better way to regulate content moderation would be to pass laws that regulate content moderation. Not backdoor regulations through very broad interpretations of product liability.

HN surely has some underage users. If they look at their analytics and tweak the interface to improve time on site, are they also intentionally creating a product that is addictive to children?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#185

Post by kermatt »

93po wrote: post #147
gmerc wrote: post #31

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

I'd settle for corporate jail time. No more profiting off illegal activity when the fine is less than profit. Nope, corporate jail. All operations have to stop for your sentence. No sales, no product development, no operations. Maybe an outside team of accountants can be allowed to run your books. This would effectively be a death sentence for many companies, but at least it mirrors the experience humans have to endu…

Real jail time for corporate officers.

Currently there is no downside for sociopathic behavior. Employment contracts guarantee they earn if the stock does well. If not they get a golden parachute on the way out.

If those that ran the company were actually responsible for what the company does, then this shit would not happen.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#186

Post by intended »

eli wrote: post #183
intended wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are difficult lawsuits for sure! But that is because the status quo is already messed up. These cases are going to bring up questions on content moderation, engagement, ad revenue, age verification, and a whole host of insane things that people don’t want to think about.

I think a better way to regulate content moderation would be to pass laws that regulate content moderation. Not backdoor regulations through very broad interpretations of product liability. HN surely has some underage users. If they look at their analytics and tweak the interface to improve time on site, are they also intentionally creating a product that is addictive to children?

I think your question needed to be discussed 10 years ago.

I don’t know the answer to your example, but I would very much like to know what the canonical answer is, and what the pros and cons are.

It’s not a topic that gets as much attention, even here on HN.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#187

Post by s1artibartfast »

brk wrote: post #68
gmerc wrote: post #31

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

While that is certainly a topic worth pursuing, especially for anyone with a "corporations are people" argument, the challenge is the immediate vacuum afterwards, which is likely to attract copy-cats. You might "execute" a corporation for proven anti-human actions, but that takes time. New corporations can crop up, maybe even involving some of the same prior executives, and the cycle starts again.

The "corporations are people" argument is better understood as "corporations are made of people".

The analog of people not losing speech when speaking through a corporation would be persecution for criminal acts while working for one.

This absolutely exists already. The challenge is finding a law that was broken.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#189

Post by ben_w »

jm4 wrote: post #140
gmerc wrote: post #31

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives. Our system can…

> but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis.

I don't think it would cause that much damage. If I understand right about floats and stuff, Meta is 2.13% of the S&P500, so NVIDIA (8%) could sneeze and cause more fallout to pension plans and so on than deleting Meta entirely. A sudden worldwide loss of access to content on Meta's servers would cause more secondary fallout than what happens to the markets.

But if forcibly dis-incorporating Meta did cause such market fallout, there's always this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837

Re: Mark Zuckerberg's biggest legal nightmare yet could cost Meta $1.4T

#190

Post by robin_reala »

kmeisthax wrote: post #133
gmerc wrote: post #31

Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare.

I originally had a thing about "piercing the corporate veil" written, but after some consultation with Google's shit AI[0], it told me about the legal writ of "quo warranto"[1], which was apparently used as legal proceedings in the US to argue for the dissolution of a company. So, in other words, we have a corporate death penalty, it just has a weird name, is mired in a bunch of weirdly English legal history, and it…

On [0], you don’t have to use Google. There are plenty of other better options these days.
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