Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, then, it's a matter of degree like most things. And perhaps, again, "what most businesses do" is not really a good defense to hide behind? I'm so tired of the whatabouts and the normalization and the pretending like this billion trillion whatever company has does anything but take advantage of its power to defend itself with slants and lies that any normal person or small group could never get away with. You…
>And perhaps, again, "what most businesses do" is not really a good defense to hide behind? If you're doing what every one else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted, that's reeks of political motivated prosecution.
Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
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Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#42I think what's missing here is elderly. Arguably, that's even more harmful.
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#43Side note: what the everliving fuxxorz is up with their cookie banner. It seems wildly illegal. Enough that I'm not gonna read their shit ever again if they stick with THAT. The only two options are "accept all" and "reject all and subscribe".
This was supposed to be a form of consumer empowerment, not a literal extortion mechanism.
How am I supposed to take their stance seriously? They rag on people who do shit like this
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#44I hope people can see Meta is funding the other side in order to get Child Safety laws passed so they can have an out when children use their parent's device and Meta spies on them. Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
Dissolve the company. Jail the C levels. End of story. If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on. The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are comp…
Get your pillow ready, because this is the only thing that'll happen if the verdict goes against them. Of course, the verdict could go the other way so no fine is levied at all. Maybe get a second pillow just in case
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that true or is it just people that challenge the power of the current Communist Party leadership that get punished?
There is this recent example https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/20/evergrande-...
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#46I hope people can see Meta is funding the other side in order to get Child Safety laws passed so they can have an out when children use their parent's device and Meta spies on them. Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
Dissolve the company. Jail the C levels. End of story. If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on. The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are comp…
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#47More CEOs need to go to prison.
One thing China does well. Put people that damage their society or economy behind bars.
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#48More CEOs need to go to prison.
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#49I hope people can see Meta is funding the other side in order to get Child Safety laws passed so they can have an out when children use their parent's device and Meta spies on them. Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
Dissolve the company. Jail the C levels. End of story. If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on. The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are comp…
More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.
Re: Hook, hold, harvest and hide: Meta's alleged strategy laid out in first week
#50In my opinion at least, any attempt to intentionally engineer addiction is morally wrong and should be at the very least civilly if not criminally actionable (if it can be proven). It's mind control. That phrase is often associated with woo woo conspiracy theory, but I don't think that's hyperbolic. If you are engineering addiction, what you're doing is attempting to run a black hat security attack against the human…
By your definition, almost any ad is mind control and should be forbidden. At least any effective ad. And I don't disagree at that conclusion. There's a difference between telling people you have a product and making people want to have your product
Murder is a tidy kind of evil. If you murder someone that's bad and you go to jail, and murder is pretty decisive. The victim is no longer alive. The black and white nature kills all the nuance around "why did you do it?" It doesn't matter why you killed them. You killed them so you committed murder.
This, however, has shades of grey, and that sucks. If I write a novel and try to make it entertaining and make it a page turner by making chapters punchy and short, is that "engineering addiction?" What if I design a game and try to make it fun and end up making it addictive?
You end up with stuff like the famous and infamous statement about porn: "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." That sucks because to police something you need definitions and lines.
Moral problems like this suck because they require deeply nuanced thinking and a continuous social discourse around where to draw the line, and we hate that. People like absolutes. So one problem you tend to get with moral problems like this is bifurcation of the discourse into moralist crusaders with a zero-tolerance policy versus libertines who think it's not a problem. Both of these extremes lead to abuse and immoral actions. The crusaders end up being worse tyrants than the problem, while the libertines leave the sheep to be devoured by wolves.
But that's what this is. It's a complicated grey problem that mandates a continuous ongoing social discourse and a never-ending series of court cases. But it exists, so we have to deal with it, so we have to do that.
It means we have to think. Ugh.
To answer your question directly: yeah, I think a big part of the ad industry falls here, and that's good. What remains is ads that are informative, playful, or entertaining, and those are the kids of ads we don't tend to hate so much. Some of them can even be legitimate art.
The best way to start with problems like this is: start by drawing a line just to the right of the stuff that is unambiguously terrible.
If you create a scientific R&D program to study the human brain and human psychology with the express purpose of engineering addiction and then fail to communicate this fact to the people you're trying to addict, that's IMO pretty damn unambiguously evil. When the government did this it was called MKULTRA and there were congressional hearings over it and people shredded documents and hid under rocks in fear of what they were doing coming to light, which kind of shows that the people doing it knew it was bad. So let's start by banning that kind of shit even if it's happening in the private sector with private money.
Then once you've drawn that line, re-assess. If the problem is still terrible and pervasive, consider drawing another line a little further to the right. Repeat.