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

reuters.com

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

#501
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That’s a serious mental problem.

It’s also a convenient, easily identifiable excuse to a decent portion of the populace.

Decent portion of juries.

Just a case of Affluenza, right?!

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

#502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are always the hero from their own perspective. I'm certain in his mind that he's just connecting friends, family, and improving society's ability to socialize, so forth and so on. Put more cynically - the first person a good liar lies to is themselves, though I think often it doesn't even start as a lie. People just end up pursuing something and ultimately creating something entirely different, but remain una…

"They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks."

One of the things I'm most thankful for is growing up before social media and such became ubiquitous, and permanent. Imagine if you had things you said in your teen years, in private, following you for the rest of your life. He was 19 but, especially in modern times, that's still a lifetime away from being a mature adult.

It's one reason I'm happy to see social media disappear and, if not that, then at least age restricted. My kids will say stupid things in those years - we all do. And I don't want that to follow them as they look back on their earlier selves and invariably cringe.

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

#503
post #408
post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has a "feeds" (or something like that) view, that is exactly your subscriptions in chronological order. As for restricting nighttime usage and imposing daily limits, somehow my mom managed to do that (for video games) without any corporate features in the 90s, while being a single working mother. One time when I was particularly uncooperative she just went to the electrical panel and shut off the power to my…

All the recent evidence ( https://www.npr.org/2026/03/09/nx-s1-5736553/fast-food-scree... ) is that people who are best at self-regulation don't do it by surrounding themselves with tempting things and will-powering themselves not to indulge in them, they do it by changing their environment so the tempting things aren't an option. They're changing the environment via the courts and the ballot box. The people with no…

The first premise of the case is that it's to protect the children, so this doesn't make any sense - it's not people with self-regulation improving their own environment. Parents are the ones who are supposed to make sure their children have limits, in general, not just for social media. Social media/etc. makes it easy (or can make it easy) with parental controls.

Even construed more broadly, this makes no sense. All of these cases and the criticism hinge on harms of addiction, that pretty much by definition apply primarily to those with poor self-regulation. Those with proper self-regulation need them much less - so it's basically paternalism. Supposedly some people don't know what's best for them, they are "addicted" to watching cat videos. As, again, is obvious in this case, since the case is literally about children.

I, personally, like infinite scroll algo reels. I probably spend about 20 minutes a week on them, and if anything I'd prefer the algo to be more tailored / "addictive" cause it tends to over focus quickly and bore me. It sure sucks at addicting me. I don't want the state to interfere with what FB can or cannot do with the algo. If an adult gets addicted to reels, they are definitely not a victim.

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