Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
The other article says: "OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade" [1]
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
Exactly. Meta basically got out of this without any meaningful penalty or deterant for the future. Paid out to the 50 states, it only averages $36M a year per state. I can't believe all of the state AGs signed on for this no-op.
The pain inflicted is way worse than the cash. They now must make teens have aggressive time limits and time of day boundaries. Meta knows this means teens will leave forever to competitors and never come back as they age. That is a death sentence for them unless they can somehow convince their competitors to follow suit. I kind of hope the competitors laugh and watch Meta burn. Then each get sued to the same end individually.
Except that the settlement includes making YouTube and TikTok implement the same stuff. The settlement amount stops by a third if the states don’t make their competition make the same changes.
The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
If you inhale the smoke, it's quite irrelevant whether smoking an industrial cigarette, pipe or a hand-crafted cigar without additives. You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough. Smoke is always carcinogenic.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
You're not wrong about smoke always being bad--there's a reason American Spirits have to have a disclaimer about "additive-free" not meaning healthier. Tobacco takes up alpha emitters from the soil and leaves them in your body--never good.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
Fun fact: the stress that smoking cigarettes relieves is only the stress caused by the addiction/relapse from nicotine. Surely, there might be some placebo effects going on, but nicotine is not a stress relieving chemical.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
Zyn is freebase nicotine which does show some signs of being performance enhancing; mostly around focus. There are a lot of people with unmedicated ADHD self-medicating with Zyn, or vapes, or smoking due to the this.
I don't smoke, but when I've talked to smokers a lot of it is about the ritual. Filling the pipe, cutting and smelling the cigar, or removing the cigarette from the pack, tapping it, lighting it up, the taste and smell of the smoke, it's all part of it not just the nicotine.
That’s not true. The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%, not “probably” (somewhere between 15 and 30 times higher risk than a non-smoker).
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
> By age 80y, an estimated 48.3% of current-smokers (41.1% never-smokers) will develop cancer, and 14% will develop lung cancer [0]
"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".
Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.
OP said: “You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough”.
That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.
That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.
We don't actually know that yet. The main studies are still ongoing, because this tends to be the kind of thing you measure over decades, and we haven't had those yet.
Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?
We don't know.
We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.
Smoking's harms are observable in the short term! You don't need long-term longitudinal studies to show smoking is bad. And we have known mechanisms for that harm that relate to combustion. We know mechanically that vapes are not combusting plant material, and we also don't see the same kinds of obvious harms in the short term. It takes willful blindness to the ills of smoking to suggest that vaping might be as harmful or more harmful than smoking.
It takes "wilful blindness" to suggest vaping can be understood completely today.
We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.
I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.
So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!
>Vaping is not healthy but there is a lot less material inhaled. No fine particles which do real damage.
Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.
Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.
If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!
>You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.
I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.
Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.
It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.
Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.
My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").
That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.
Im not confused. A lot of the context you are inferring is just in your mind.
It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.
I suspect (anecdote) vaping is just as bad if not worse. People vape EVERYWHERE. Almost any place you can't smoke, people still vape. So - that it happens that way makes me think the total exposure is a lurking problem.
I just bought a $50 Android phone, quad core, 8GB RAM, 1 year of mobile service (albeit limited, but free WiFi is everywhere).
Have all the age restriction you want. A kid goes into the store with their lunch money (a few days worth) and they have a valid phone number and an unrestricted device.
Everything requires ID to use? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I agree.
And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.
Interesting point. Clear and visible warnings similar to tabacco and gambling websites (at least here in NZ) would be great. A clear and explicit call out of the dangers and a direct link on how to get help would be a good place to start.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)
And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
Maybe, but I'm not sure how that might work. Meta was being sued by states in federal court, here--not the federal government. Is the theory that they would have paid more in penalties had not the White House pressured the federal court in Oakland (who aren't necessarily nominated by/beholden to Trump) to reject bigger demands from the plaintiffs? Or is the theory that the White House influenced the plaintiffs' (states) lawyers to offer/accept smaller settlements than they would have otherwise? Or that the White House pressured Meta to accept a larger settlement when they ordinarily would have fought more (in which case, I don't understand what Meta gets: they lose this case and then you theorize they'll help manipulate elections in favor of the group that forced the loss)?
> Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands...and your plan is to blackmail this person? [pauses, smiles] Good luck.
The US politicians class is corrupt and captured by special interests. These 17B were already as provisions on their balance sheet. They will spend four times this in the next data center....
I dunno, I kinda feel they have to pay the price for governments not having applicable regulations on this kinda stuff.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
So what should the law be? Don't be negligent? Don't be reckless? It already functions that way. Do we need to have statutes expressly dictating what people are allowed to do?
>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 cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
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?
>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them?
Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).
Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.
But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.
And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)
And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.
And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.
And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch
People who don't use social media to catch up with distant friends and family just ... phone or video call.
No addiction, no infinite scroll, no exhaustion, no casino-like mechanics, no endorphins, no political rage, no AI companions, no random posts, no influencers.
Or go super old school and send a handwritten letter.
We've stayed in touch with eachother's social groups via various means of communication since antiquity without social media algorithms.
We need to re-normalize not knowing what is going on in someone else's life 24/7, and re-normalize not having 24/7 instant access to another person. It's not healthy.
Also, text messages don't need an instant response, nor should the other party expect an instant response. It's asynchronous communication for a reason!
You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.
The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
My neighbors and school parents all coordinate via WhatsApp. The sky will not fall no, but if you don't join those groups you wouldn't know about upcoming HOA meetings, school events, important forms to fill etc.
Facebook is useful for bigger communities like moms groups. We found babysitters that way.
One of my social clubs tried to skip out of social media and was originally meeting in person, calling each other etc, but information just fell through the cracks as the club got larger.
A lot of small businesses use these platforms for outreach. Without them they wouldn't have an avenue to reach and stay in contact with customers. An example would be a potter showing their work on Instagram and then linking back to their Shopify website.
Big tech literally has fingers in every single pie imaginable and it's real money for a lot of people, unfortunately.
Yeah, that's a very good counter-argument. I recently talked to a potter exactly like that, they said Instagram is their primary sales channel. Unlike for me, for them leaving would have significant financial consequences. The majority of users are not in this situation though.
Things would be a massive PITA without WhatsApp for me. I guess iMessage/RCS would do, or one of the many alternatives, but in the UK, WA is the messaging platform.
I vibe coded an app to help me manage my Toastmasters groups and WhatsApp API made it really easy for me to nudge people when needed and ask for volunteers or confirmation of attendance.
Honestly speaking I would not be in a leadership position for my Toastmasters groups if I needed to call each individual member every week as my other Toastmaster club does. That probably says something about me, but I'm sure many other folks would have a similar outlook.
> The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
>> Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
I'd argue it isn't similar in an important way, people cannot opt out of eating entirely. Overeaters must eat. People who can't control themselves with social media do not need to use them at all.
No they don't, not really. They are endorphin machines as you said. The perceived utility is a false perception caused by their being endorphin machines.
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)
HN is social media only in strictly technical sense of the term.
HN isn't optimized daily for engagement like FB and IG are. There isn't a single image, or video on website. Ads (for YC companies) sometimes show up and are rare. Color scheme-wise it is very plain (and should stay like that). HN is not hidden behind login wall. It is not tracking you. You can access HN fully anonymously, and create throwaway accounts for posting.
there's no need to "optimize" it already has the basic loop. stochastic reward (interesting news, interesting comments/replies), gamification (points go up!), and no real social interaction. (no connection, some performative elements, ie. comments are written not just to one known person or a small group of people you know.)
the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.
Sure you can. Click a user, see their comments, submissions.
I would say hn is in a group of systems that include Facebook.
It's true that contemporary commercial social media tends to be associated with these big corporate services that have already been thoroughly enshittified.
But they didn't start out that way - and alternatives are possible and desirable (hn, lobste.rs, many niche forums, IRC channels, discord servers[d] etc are proofs by example).
Maybe a loose definition would be communication system that leverage the network effect?
And good social media aligns with the end-user, and bad aligns with user-hostile forces?
[d]: (I don't particularly like discord, but it is much closer to a tool that does what I want: connect with people - than something like tick-tock or Facebook as it exists today)
I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local <whatever> only posts updates on <app> so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO.
I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.
> Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
Yes. I've stopped Facebook and Instagram, and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube. I've failed to cut those out as well. The addiction is a lot stronger than we'd all like to assume in my opinion.
> and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube
I don't disagree with you at all, but doesn't this go against what most people are claiming in this thread (that Meta products are uniquely engineered to be addictive, to a significant degree)? Hacker News doesn't have any especially "addictive" features. They don't make money off this site, there's no ads, there's no personalized algorithm, no promotion of ragebait, etc. Yet plenty of us use it day after day or find ourselves distracted by it.
Youtube is more obviously addictive, but it's hardly social media. It's just media.
Meta has done a lot of harm in the world, don't get me wrong, but I think people are stretching a bit when they act like none of these technologies would be addictive on their own if not for the company's design.
Upvotes, downvotes, trending, there's still an algorithm on HackerNews.
Meta is the one being sued currently, obviously they are the biggest one, and have tried even harder to keep users coming back in addictive ways, and likely targeted children more directly.
I'd say HackerNews also has better moderation where they actively will remove ragebait, where Meta services often encourages it.
I see your general point though, but I don't think people act like these technologies wouldn't be addictive separate from some corporate endorser. A homemade cigarette is still an addictive cigarette, but that doesn't stop you from suing and regulating tobacco companies.
The other question you might raise is, what alternative isn't addictive? I think many have said that feeds should simply be chronological, same for comments. Instead of upvote/downvote, there should be reviews (score how much you liked the video/article), and users could sort by review score as well. You shouldn't be allowed to push content that users didn't explicitly subscribed too (ads should be ads on the side, not promoted content injected into your feed for example). And so on. Is it too restrictive, maybe, I think it's an interesting debate to have though, like what do we lose/gain making it less addictive, and what is actually less addictive?
If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.
For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.
So why don't you just override your monkey brain that hordes of clever people trick in to scrolling more? Why don't you just get all of your social circle to move off Meta? Why don't you just use Ebay over FB Marketplace? Why don't you just convince your housing development to use something other than WhatsApp for sharing equipment? Why don't you just find a different channel through which to promote your small business? Why don't you just accept to be a social outcast?
The vast, vast majority can't pay that price.
And yes, some programmer somewhere has his programmer friends in Matrix. And no, that doesn't work beyond that very case. Why is this so hard to understand?
You fall out of society, basically. In my circles, most people expect everyone our age to have Instagram, even though it's been blocked by the government since 2022.
As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.
I deactivated Instagram about 6 months ago and while there are definitely benefits I also miss out on a lot of local events and updates. It can be a useful tool if done right.
That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.
Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008
Yeah, I currently live in one of those countries where businesses only post on facebook. I do fine without it. If I need something I google it and it shows up on google maps. I only see what I want to see instead of being inundated with unwanted ads from irrelevant businesses.
Most news is unnecessary noise that most normal people can do nothing about so why waste emotional cycles reading that? For everything else, like important weather alerts, holiday events, etc, I go to the weather website for my country and for events I see signs up around the city. I keep up with tech news by reading HN, financial stuff I can find on yahoo finance, and for global stuff, which I rarely check, I read Ground News.
Ground News was shown to be a right-wing psyop and an AI slop machine, FWIW. It also doesn't deliver the value it says on the tin, since you can't actually read the articles it links to unless you have subscriptions on those sites.
does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.
so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.
that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.
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.
> 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.
They do not want to give you the best digital experience you can have, they want to give you the most addictive and exploitative digital experience they can legally get away with because they value the money that brings in more than they value anything else. They'll be content to see you hurt or killed if it makes them more money. They've knowingly been hurting and killing people, including children, for money. Meta, and the corporations like it, have leveraged all of their vast resources against the average person and the average person is always going to lose in that situation.
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 room. That worked like a charm. Today, there are all kinds of parental control features instead.
However, how can you expect people to do parenting, when grown adults are apparently not even capable of basic self-regulation?
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 self-regulation are the ones complaining about the possibility of having their dopamine toys taken away.
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.
iOS app installation (what some people call "side-loading") is done by signing up as a developer and then installing the apps as if you're developing them. You have to refresh them every 7 days in Xcode or they'll get deleted from your phone as that is one of Apple's anti-using-developer-mode-to-actually-install-things measures, and you can only install up to 3 apps this way, though apparently there's some kind of chameleon app that wraps multiple other apps with a menu.
the only thing I'm asking for is better control over my cigarettes. Let me remove all the carcinogens, addictive substances and dont let me inhale things that are hazardous for my health. And do this by default on all cigarettes!
It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.
The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.
I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.
What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".
I think you are conflating "the best data we have" with "sufficient data to prove something".
I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.
It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.
So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Which means, IMO:
(1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future.
(2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
Well:
(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;
(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;
(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to
(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.
Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.
In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.
This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.
In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.
So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. Why not also in the social media case?
> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm.
No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.
For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.
In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.
> Why not also in the social media case?
The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.
I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.
> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
I agree. Whenever everyone thinks something is true, we should be skeptical that it's true. Since everyone hates Putin so much, we should be skeptical that he is actually bad. Since everyone thinks the sky is blue, it must actually be green.
Having seen the increase in suicide rates for girls and young women [1], and having read the arguments for why no other explanation fits that data, I am convinced social media is indeed to blame.
But as someone else put it once regarding global warming, what's the worst case if we reign in social media anyway? That we make the Internet a less addictive place for nothing?
But I'm not making a comparison. The parent I'm responding to is asserting that kids before Facebook did not have a lack of freedom.
I am saying that school is a lack of freedom, therefore his assertion is wrong.
This is quite relevant when we're talking about depression in children. Eg from looking at South Korea we can see that the education system itself can be a cause of depression in kids, meaning that it's likely depressive in our countries too (just less than in SK).
I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.
Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.
I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.
Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?
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.
If I pay for a streaming service, I'll compare it with other paid streaming services.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.
(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)
I'd be happy with it as a service where I search for a video, and get a decent result, and not see shorts.
In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.
Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.
If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?
I found a good solution. In the YouTube settings you can turn off your watch history. It’ll want you that your recommendations will not be as good. You can watch a YouTube short, but when you try to scroll to the next one, it’ll tell you that there is no next video because watch history is not enabled.
The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of
Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
Indeed, but it shows they're not "innovative" as in not willing to iterate on their platform to maximise user satisfaction. They see it as, essentially, a folder full of mkv files. Which you could also publish, but nobody would actually use it just like nobody uses Nebula. I subscribe to Nebula because I think we need to incentivise that kind of project but I don't actually use it.
Absolutely! I had to sign out from YouTube on mobile (I was only using YouTube via browser anyway, not the app) to reduce the time I spent watching them. After signing out the shorts are so random I lost the interest in them.
I use brave browser on iOS which has a feature to block YouTube shorts. It’s clearly a cat and mouse as YouTube keeps changing the selector but works 95% of the time
Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].
Not just kids. With one of my friends, even when I'm playing a game together with them, I'll sometimes hear some audio over their headset... there was a dull moment for like 10 seconds and they're already on their phone... "Are you watching YouTube Shorts again?" "No, this time it's Reels!" Shorts, reels, clips, doohickey whatever-the-fucks it doesn't matter what they're called, I hate it.
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 that.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.
>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
I don't think it's the same. People usually don't see their "relationship" with celebrities as peer-to-peer. They either look up or look down on them (i.e., idolize or hate). So the attention you get from fans as a celebrity is actually a lot more meaningful. People go to great lengths to tell you about the impact you had on their life and they don't forget you easily. The scale makes it awkward, but the emotions are real.
On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.
I always thought fandom was '3rd party.' Like, you have an actor in a high-exposure job, but the more the middleware companies boost the allure of any arbitrary celebrity, the more money they'll make. The actor may address 'the people at large' during press events, but by-and-large, don't really interface with fans all that much.
> We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.
Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree.
> [...]
> Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put
Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.
There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.
>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.
> 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...).
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 conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
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!)
Obviously it's not healthy to plop down in front of a TV for hours ever day. The science behind what social media is doing to young brains is very real, and to compare it to gameboy is arguing in bad faith.
personally i reject any frame of mind that makes stubborn, labeled generalizations about kids based on one or a handful of interactions. the people who conduct their business this way: they are always projecting.
The people building the app didn’t know any better either.
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
Yes, do you think Parents spend every waking hour hovering over their kids?
Good to know how childless you are, or fortunate enough to grow helicopter wings.
The grift is strong when the marks are the fault. Black people are also at fault for living in a ghetto and getting addicted to crack served by the CIA in the 80s.
In fact I have 3 children, thanks! And controlling your child's screen time + social media is a very possible thing! It's called "raising your children".
Please stay on topic lest everyone get confused by your nonsense about unrelated topics.
People like you really do make the comments on HN quite bad. Do better!
The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
Only if we make sure it applies to your HN social media time. After all, we wouldn’t want you to get too used to your own freedom and autonomy. We must remind you that random people like me must consent to you doing what you want with a social media platform!
There isn't some magical switch that's flipped on your 18th birthday where you suddenly be pragmatic and make rational decisions. Even into your 20s, your brain is still developing. My mother is in her 60s and addicted to facebook and tiktok. It takes significant willpower to overcome addictions for most people. The brain of an 18 year old addicted to social media is mashing the "do the feel good thing" button just the same as a 17 year old.
The state already restricts what adults do on their phones. You can't buy drugs or look at CSAM. You can't use your phone while driving or operating dangerous machinery. You can't install apps which facilitate piracy. You can't wipe your phone when the state lawfully requests it from you. The list goes on.
Are you saying that because laws exist, and it’s illegal to break the law while using your phone, that is therefore justification for making it illegal to scroll on social media for longer than an hour each day?
There's a big difference between "the state should start doing something that it does not do/hasn't ever done" and "the state controls something and it should change the way it does that".
That's not pedantry. That's the difference between "darn gub'mint won't let me land my private jet on the freeway" and "darn gub'mint lowered the speed limit on the freeway".
If you want to argue that the state shouldn't control phone use related to social media, you need to engage with the ways they already control phone use, and whether/how well those work (and have a complex conversation about the costs/benefits of adding an additional control); it's dishonest to frame it as a qualitative shift from not restricting what adults do on their phones to doing that.
No it's pure unbridled pedantry. The state does not allow you to use any object or thing to break the law, including your own body. Thus by your definition the state "controls" everything, making the distinction irrelevant.
Imagine making this same argument but for something like slavery: "Well, the government already controls what we can do with our bodies, so the concept of forcing some people to a life of hard labor will require you to engage with the ways they already control peoples bodies, how well they work, and we should have a complex conversation about the cost/benefits of this additional control. It's dishonest to frame it as a qualitative shift, it's more akin to the government lowering the speed limit."
We can also just say no. End of discussion. You nor anyone else gets to tell me what otherwise-non-illegal media I can consume.
The state already tells adults what content they can consume. Truth in advertising laws, pornography restrictions, MPAA ratings and age restrictions, pirated media, and so on. Even with a default of freedom of speech, the state has numerous subsidy/financial-penalty mechanisms by which it can and does restrict what content is practically available for consumption.
I'd prefer facebook to not give away free drugs to the drug addicts.
Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.
A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.
A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.
Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.
I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
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.
It's not the same. Aesbestos makers knew, their customers didn't, and they actively fought against the customers knowing it. Whereas NaOH makers know and go as far as writing it on the packaging.
a few weeks ago i was visiting my parents and caught a little bit of a documentary they had on.
it all became clear as day.
apparently in the 70s used car salesmen would manipulate the odometers in cars they were selling to make the cars appear to have really low mileage. they would also do other random stuff like put saw dust in the transmission to hide any kind of knocking noises.
the media started doing investigations into this which led to laws making those kind of things illegal.
they had tons of interviews with various owners of the car lot chains who were eventually found guilty of things like rolling back odometers. and every single one of them sounded sleazy and confident. every single one of these guys who were caught red handed blamed the buyers saying things like:
“it’s not my fault they bought a shit car.”
we allowed a bunch of greasy slimey used car salesmen to take over. slimey used car salesmen in quarter-zips who sound confident.
Only to children? What about adults? Yes, I know we are supposed to be more responsible, but this things are made to be addicted and you don't realize until it is too late.
If you are on Android, you can use Revanced Manager or Morphe to patch the YouTube apk with all kinds of controls that include the ability to hide shorts and the comments section. Ad blocking works well too but using those patches requires a bit of a cat and mouse game since YouTube backend updates break things and require occasionally patching a newer apk version. You can also enable all of the client-side YouTube premium features.
Market cap is generally the wrong measure. If you registered asf1254 Inc., and it was always just you, and it traded like Meta stocks trade, then "asf1254 Inc." would have a market cap ~6.2× whatever you're currently earning.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The sibling comment, talking about Schrödinger, is correct for the wrong reason.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
What % of META (shares) are owned by Meta Platforms Inc.?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
That's like a court ordering 10% of your home be put on the market in a way that never forces you to pay rent, when you're likely to live in it for the rest of your life.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
> it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
> And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
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.
I actually don’t think banning “the algorithm” is the right solution either, nor are the identity verification disguised as age gates. But I would like to see the US government do something. I actually think Lina Khan was doing some good things.
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.
Not GP, but I'd define it as anything which presents or orders/prioritizes user-generated content based on preferences not explicitly specified by the consuming user. That'd be something like "default to chronological friends-and-follows-only, with an option for friends-of-friends and an option for 'most liked within a time window', and (if Facebook is feeling magnanimous to a very few power users) a preference pane which allows controlling overrides to the chronological-ness like 'show posts up to X hours out of order if they have more than Y likes'". No recommendation/you-might-also-like system, but you can make the "accounts friended/followed by" button for a user's existing friends/follows as big as you like--so long as the list presented is only sortable only by name/follower count/date-added.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
I can’t wait for the equal coal reckoning. What is it 20k direct deaths a year? 2 million early deaths? The Great Barrier Reef 100% dead after this El Niño. A deliberate cover up of the science?
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.
In the UK there are fairly strong rules against advertising junk food to kids.
Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).
Fast food and snack companies are the absolute masters of marketing to children. If the United States really cared they'd put a blanket ban on advertising to children like some jurisdictions (Quebec) have done.
>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.
Even if we assume children don't find a way around this, they will simply switch to a different social media app after their two hours are up, or switch to an app that doesn't have the two hour limit at all.
This is clearly a rule that would have to be mandated by the government, or perhaps parental controls on their devices (not sure why parenting was ruled out here apparently). Same with whatever opinions people have on an algorithm showing you content you'd enjoy, which has always been the goal of media since the concept of a magazine was created, they just didn't have the right tools available.
It also will only punish kids who actually gave their age no? That's not actually required (yet) to sign up for a social media app. I was probably 9 when I started clicking a random year for my age when signing up. Doesn't take you long to figure out you have to jump through hoops when your honest.
Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
4chan doesn’t use tricks to get people addicted to their feed. Similarly, most platforms cannot hire the smartest people to build addictive algorithms. The danger is much lower.
4chan doesn’t rely on likes or upvotes, and posts are ostensibly "anonymous" (not attached to a persistent identity). Instead, users earn their feel-good chemicals by the amount of attention they can generate, positive or negative, as measured in number of replies or impact on board culture. Threads themselves are kept alive based on how often they receive a reply relative to their peers, with each board having a set capacity for active threads; the least popular threads are quickly pruned out of existence.
This system encourages gamifying replies by creating content that elicits strong fear, anger, or excitement responses, or opinions or media so shocking that it’s impossible not to interact with them. Combined with a lax free-speech policy, you get a website that reinforces the nastiest, most unsanitized content, often far-removed from reality, which can exacerbate mental illness or depression among vulnerable populations.
While other social media platforms also encourage their creators to exploit fear, anger, or excitement, leaning too heavily on emotionality without being acceptable to your audience can cause your post to be buried or underperform. Emotional engagement is only one factor in success, alongside the like-to-dislike ratio, watch time, creator reputation, and palatability to advertisers. If you post, e.g., an emotionally provocative YouTube video that completely dismantles your audience’s preexisting conception of you (a leftist posting a right-wing video), the video will likely be dislike-bombed and thus unable to climb very far in the algorithm, while your reputation will be tarnished among your hardcore fans. Even on a more pseudo-anonymous platform like Reddit, going too far against the grain of a subreddit will get your post downvoted and hidden from anyone not sorting by new, and probably deleted by the mods.
4chan doesn’t have these issues. Even if you are outside the Overton window of a specific board, as long as the post has enough substance to fuel outrage (there is a difference between cheap outrage and more visceral, long-lasting outrage that can only be created by someone intimately familiar with the subject), your post can still be successful, although you will be bombarded with racial slurs and death threats. It’s ragebait in its purest form.
Disclaimer: I have never posted on 4chan and these are just my observations from lurking.
> Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
You forgot "evil" in your description of the company.
It is supposed to realign their incentives away from massively exploiting society for purely financial gain. There is ample evidence that Meta has gone out of its way to encourage the discussed issues, so clearly there was a problem with the incentive structure. Given all the lobbying they've done to prevent any passage of laws regulating their conduct, it's fallen to the courts to correct this (if, as other comments say, somewhat unsatisfactorily).
I think the damage that Meta has done not only to children, but to all human beings alive and online today, cannot be put into monetary terms.
Meta should be destroyed and forced to stop all operations immediately. I think it would be quite an interesting wake-up call when we would then realize that... nothing of value was lost and the world will just go on - just a little bit saner and happier.
> The company said 30% of that amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
This is pretty shady. The $17B figure is much less impressive when a huge chunk of it is hinged on competitors choosing to hurt their business.
For what its worth, if you believe Meta's product does do this damage, the other products which do similar things should also abide by it.
It helps simultaneously "level the playing field" but also protects consumers.
If the courts stated ruling is hinged on consumer protection then this seems fair. Any competitor which doesn't follow suit is likely opening themselves up to a similar lawsuit which would cost a similar order of magnitude of damages (so it is in the interest of the competitors to do take these actions)
Solution is not to have another app that is built on likes, nor on feeds. We have seen, even for adults the apps built to constrain the use of social media apps and devices are ineffective. Only way forward is to create opportunities for real time, conversations that are not chat based. It has also shown that people are less mean, when interacting in real time with a human as opposed to writing a short comment. Especially in US, where defaults are system are creating more walls between people, instead of creating more opportunities to interact in real time. People sit in car, from there isolated single family homes, and go to their destination mostly that way. There is no spontaneous opportunities to mingle with the neighbors, nor with new people at train stations or at town square. I built https://tosynch.com to do one thing, and one thing only : reconnect with friends and meet often. No likes, no feeds, no ads, no noisy notifications, setup and forget.
There is part of me who would love to see the style of internet created by companies like Meta regulated out of existence but the logical part of my mind recognizes this could lead to things like age verification laws, online surveillance and other much worse government controls over the internet.
For context Meta had $61.8 billion revenue and $15.85 billion net income in Q2 2026. So this entire “existential threat” of teenage safety amounts to one bad quarter for the company, and they will continue on unscathed.
Meta pays smartphone makers to pre-install the Facebook app. And 3 more hidden services. Don't just remove the FB app, you need to remove all from FB because they will still continue to follow you.
Shameful behavior. Anyone working on making these products more addictive or otherwise benefitting from their negative impact on society and politics should take a long hard look in the mirror.
Technically does this not create a problem for their EPS because of the poor free cash flow? Current market consensus is $81B in Net Income for the year but a -$6.7B cashflow for 2026[1]. But the stock is up 1%. So, is the -$12B is priced in(somehow)?
It is over 10 years, so cash flow impact is ~1.8b per year if it was equal installments. Given that 30% is conditional on TikTok and YouTube agreeing to similar controls and paying similar amounts and other payment terms the number might be even lower for 2026.
Share prices are weakly correlated to news events anyway, if you ask the professionals they would say it was already "priced in" that is why a news event is not moving the stock when it doesn't move, and when it does move they will it is news event causing the move.
from meta's own statement:
"The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years, but our Time Limit and Night Mode features will start with a five-year commitment. However, if industry peers sign on to the agreement, it will both extend this commitment to 10 years and prompt stronger default limits — reducing the Daily Limit to one hour per app and expanding Night Mode hours to 10:00 PM–7:00 AM (up from midnight–6:00 AM)."
I'm at loss for words at how shitty this paragraph reads. If anyone has any hope that Meta (and the rest) are even slightest concerned about the problem at hand (mental health of children), then they're very dim.
Meta literally goals on creating high-quality teen producers and consumers. Every single experiment, every single project is optimizing for that.
At least now its clear that behind the fancy marketing, its all "just business" for them and if they could, they'd sell the kids' soul to create "more shareholder value"
The other big tech companies were able to keep their settlement amounts private, since they settled before this case went to court. I wonder how their settlements compare. I bet they were much smaller given Meta took an actual L in court, they probably had less leverage when negotiating this number.
So should information be free to everyone or do we need to protect children from things they are not developmentally able to handle yet? It seems like a lot of the people praising this decision think the same thing is evil when applied in other contexts.
I remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”
In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.
It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.
If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.
There may also be an issue of objective divergence. We don’t actually know if kids’ brains are being ruined. All we know is that they’re different—probably better in some ways and worse in others. We are justifiably risk averse when it comes to non-consensually modifying how people think, but we won’t know for 20 years if the losses outweigh the gains. If giving kids ADHD is even possible (and I doubt it is) then it’s a mixed bag because neurodivergent people really do have more of the creativity, insight, and judgment that can’t be outsourced to AI; the ethical issue is that, while neurodivergence is beneficial to the collective, it’s still a hedonic net negative for the person who has it.
All we can say right now is that social media companies are irresponsible, not that they’re necessarily destructive. But institutions have always done things to people’s minds without their consent that have been reckless.
We can look at how Facebook handles its own moral responsibilities and correctly indict it. What’s shakier is the claim that 2020s social media does more psychosocial violence than, say, 1950s communities did. I’m not convinced either side of this argument decisively wins.
Squinting real hard to see a silver lining here, but when a settlement is reached, does that mean they can be tried again for the same thing? If the states can't, can individuals try their own class action suit?
As long as you have enough money to throw billion dollar darts at a trillion dollar dart board you're gonna skate out cleanly every time. There's a bigger problem here and everyone knows it.
Honest question. Who got to decide to accept this decision on behalf of state and federal citizens? This seems performative rather than punitive and doesn’t seem to match the harm.
A few days ago I learned guerrilla dissent groups here in Colombia were using Facebook and Tiktok to target children towards joining them. $16.68B is too little for them.
As a school administrator, this is pretty disappointing.
I've included slides showing a graphic of someone in a slot machine next to a screenshot of Instagram, and would do an activity where the children themselves drew connections of what they saw/knew. It was not difficult, and they hit it out of the park every time.
The fact that the possible damages sought was over 200 billion, and this settlement clocks in at less than ten percent of that value plus "concessions" that really at this point are just tablestakes for them product itself to just be viable given the parent backlash against these things, is incredibly disappointing. They have cost people on the periphery of this A LOT more, and from a merely business proposition, the wanton disregard for safety in this case proved to be a smart business move. The lawsuit should have had a chilling effect on anyone trying to do anything similar lately, but that will not be the case.
If anything this will embolden others to continue to pursue strategies of “do harm and pay the fine.” It is simply a cost for these sociopaths doing business, and our government has explicitly endorsed that status quo for decades.
this is what is most interesting to me as well.
does any of this actually go towards helping the impacted children and families?
>The settlement resolves claims brought by 29 U.S. states, and will end a federal trial that had been one of the highest-profile tests yet of allegations that social media companies harmed young users.
>Wednesday's settlement also resolves lawsuits by California, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., over privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. Those states will receive $459.3 million to resolve those lawsuits.
My concern about this isn't about the money. Frankly, no amount would actually satisfy everyone, and even an even-more-comically-large number won't materially impact Facebook (sorry, Meta).
My concerns are:
1. This is an agreed settlement w/ only Meta. This no impact on YouTube, TikTok, etc, and regulators can't point at this and say "Well Meta did it, you have to to!". This isn't a law, it's a handshake[0].
2. Will (or can) this be applicable to adults. If the implementation exists, adults should be able to opt in to it as well. Adults are also subject to addiction and social harms.
3. These restrictions feel like they're about 20 seconds away from being sidestepped by the first teenager that discovers they can make multiple instagram accounts and/or use multiple devices.
[0] This sentence sounds like Claude but I promise I wrote this myself.
Business as usual. The ownership class will always win. At this point I really doubt we will ever get anything that isn't either small payment relatively or something they can't weasel out of.
A measure of the market's perception of the threat to Meta from these lawsuits. The uncertainty is over now, so the price goes back up.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
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
The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box games. If we're establishing the precedent that addiction-engineering is bad, that's a huge win for our civilization.
Pretty much the entire mobile ecosystem is a hellscape of black hat attacks on the human central nervous system. You can do it via a web browser or a desktop too but when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it.
From the casinos (Natasha Dow Schull and Addiction by Design) to Stanford and BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab fast forward to AI to hyperboost the addiction and that's where we're at.
Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.
>when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it
I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.
> It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Isn't engagement the holy grail of any startup though? What was wrong (from a legal standpoint) about what Meta did here? I hate social media as much as the next guy just curious as to the grounds on which they were brought to justice. I have seen a couple allusions to their deliberately hiding the harmful effects of their products but have yet to see any specifics.
> The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
Some nations have great laws that deal with lootboxes. I beleive one approach is making odds known, and another is simply placing fines on firms that use loot box mechanics.
He's not going to willingly shutdown his company, the same reason a casino will not just suddenly close up shop. The owner would have to have a dramatic shift in worldview to delete the whole thing.
I know this is not a popular viewpoint around here, but as a socialist, let me ask you this question: have we considered that the market itself might be the problem? That maybe the incentives it creates are toxic for humanity?
As a moderate, I tend to think things even out eventually - though it is usually what appears to be generational shifts in behavior that causes markets to adapt. It's costly (whole generations get f'd physically/mentally/financially), but the next generation (maybe?) pushes for something different idk
I appreciate the perspective and I can see the logic, thank you for explaining your position.
That being said, the timescale of change in that proposed mechanism seems too slow to me given the extreme urgency I see in the climate crisis. Do you see a way out of it without systemic change? Do you not share the same assessment of urgency?
I'd rather not entire generations get the brunt of a entire class of problems (generations prior had significant health consequences). The best thing a society can do it seems is educate ourselves on what is damaging. When social media first came out no one was talking about what's happening now. Hard to see that very early on before it became a significant problem then aligned with corporate incentives.
The zeroth law of economics is that wants are infinite and resources limited. Economics is the study of how subjective wants can be best fulfilled given the constraints of reality.
Meaning that markets are always designed to achieve certain outcomes, and the idea of unregulated markets that work magically is fiction.
This is why you have (had) people like Lina Khan who identified how Amazon could be anticompetitive, even if kept prices low for customers. All markets have to be tuned, policed, kept clean and rules refreshed to achieve the outcomes we want as a society.
We design markets, and have the knowledge to do it well.
Maybe. I had the ... I'm not going to say "pleasure" or "displeasure", because it wasn't a particularly voluntary experience but it was an enlightening one ... of talking with a couple of newly extremely wealthy people, on a pretty deep/vulnerable level, about their worldview. Anecdotal and not that many data points, so grain of salt. These were two pretty different people in different situations.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
Overall, I didn't find either of these people unusually good or bad--they were ordinary for white-collar educated knowledge workers, with ordinary amounts of grit, greed, values, hypocrisy, and adaptive/maladaptive behaviors, to my eyes. They rationalized their having wealth with the same combination of true/false/self-serving/values-based logic that other people use to rationalize ... I dunno, not voting, or not giving money to beggars: the reasons presented are usually foils for the underlying reasons, you know?
I always come back to the born again Christian who acknowledges his wealth came from things he isn’t proud of, yet his entire public persona and social network is predicated on that wealth. He doesn’t give it away and actually live the life he’s pretending to now live. He just found a way to have both. The supposed newfound morality/religiosity was just one more thing to greedily acquire.
They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.
They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.
I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.
However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.
I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.
Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.
You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
You're being very kind and generous with the benefit of the doubt, like he even needs his own mental steelman.
For most of these ultrawealthy execs, I don't think it's even that moderately complex, and I don't think they really try to rationalize it to themselves. All they know in life is "number must go up" so that's all they really care about. In their positions, they don't have to listen to anyone but shareholders, and all shareholders care about is "number must go up." Some of them have PR people who sit there writing speeches that rationalize what they do in terms of some kind of nebulous good, but when they're done mouthing the words, they go back to their dashboards and all they are really working on is the numbers and making them go up.
Why do you need to be in his head? Something that applies to many powerful billionaires is that they believe their money and power make the superior human beings, entitled to shape the world as they see fit. Without that, they're nothing.
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
> Isn't that what most people in democracies think though?
They do think that, yes. But they're not shaping anything as they see fit, at best they're shaping as millions of other together see fit. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
It's the entropy of power. Spread that power over too many people and it becomes noise.
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 unable to see that.
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.
Those messages were posted on some rando site that doesn't seem to exist anymore - Silicon Alley [no typo] Insider. And I think the lawsuit was mostly them just wanting some of the big Facebook cash rather than actually feeling that Zuckerberg stole anything. Facebook, especially early on, was not a particularly unique nor complex to implement idea. He just hit on some good business ideas by making it feel trendy and elite with the whole university only invite only stuff, ideas Google would go on to copy with Gmail.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
Definitely not! Texting was so small-scale, and text-only, that it was fine. Big chat groups where people are bullied (or some are not invited), and nasty images are the problems there.
This is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.
The system rewards psychopaths like Mark. Decent people, like Tom from MySpace, cash their check when they have more than they need. Demons, like Mark, want more and more and more and more- they will go to any lengths to get it because screw everyone else, they are lessers. That’s Mark and that’s the system rewarding him. We all know Tom is way cooler.
> "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 your food without telling you? No, that's just actually a brain-dead, immoral position.
"Communication" includes things like fraud that are understood to be inherently harmful to other individuals and also to society at large and for which there are no sane or moral defenses. So, no, there is no default position for "communication" without further qualification.
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.
Ignoring societal conversations about the relative merits of sugar vs cocaine, you appear to have skipped/missed/ignored/misunderstood some very important words in my comment, and it has caused you to believe that I said something I did not say.
I did not say "putting cocaine in food" is bad.
I said "putting cocaine in your food without telling you" is bad.
We've decided sugar is less harmful. It's also more useful in food than cocaine which would only be there to turn people into addicts. I'm inclined to think that if companies went around adding cocaine to food to make it more addictive the way they do with sugar society would be much worse, so it seems reasonable enough. If there's data somewhere that would suggest cocaine would be less harmful than sugar though I'd be open to taking a look at it and changing my mind.
You've engaged with a straw man and allowed it to gain false legitimacy. Debate on the subjective merits of cocaine vs sugar is a complete derailment in a conversation about whether tricking people is ok.
even if you do freedom as in freedom of speech it seems somewhat diminished.
> there was a good chance of losing
now that is a good question. When a large multi-national corp offers you ~4% of yearly turnover to fuckoff, does that sound like a company confident it would win?
There were definitely horrible places on the internet pre Facebook that were popular among kids like Rotten and Ogrish. But there was not a trillion dollar company investing billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists on research to attract and hook kids to their platform. This is not remotely comparable.
They invented the red notification badge. You know, the thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content of people doing better things than you in more exotic places than you. The thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content that makes you feel bad about yourself.
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 try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward the kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents?”
surely you recognize the two situations above are not the same.
and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip who confidently says “it’s not my fault they bought the shit car.”
The case isn't whether or not this happens, it's whether or not the Facebook knew the about the harms and made decisions that were negligent at best or deliberate at worst
there's a difference between allowing exposure to unsafe content, against systematically and deliberately doing everything their psychologist/behavior economists could do to make sure kids were addicted to the product.
This is a massive gift to FB. $17B paid is a few weeks of revenue and a single quarter’s worth of profit. But even worse, this is paid out over 10 years! A billion dollars per year to eliminate this major risk is an absolute gift from the AGs. They’re cowards who should be ashamed.
not a recognized psychiatric condition as they employ how many psychiatrists on staff to specifically engineer this addition. i hate that the standard of evidence for these claims is impossibly high. Like you need an email from zuck himself that says "i want to mind rape young boys"... when there's mountains of evidence of them working to that exact goal... they just didnt say "mind rape young boys". The actions and results speak plainly enough. WE dont need zuck himself to confirm it.
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 management response is unsatisfactory, that employees may raise the concern to relevant authority. This will limit management/shareholder/board ability to pressure/incentivize an otherwise individually rational workforce to collectively behave like a psychopath.
Democracy was also extremely hard to imagine and considered impractical (even in the face of ancient Greek evidence) a few hundred years ago. And then it became the norm.
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!
This is crazy, Meta is not solely responsible for people and kids having addiction to their phones (very similar if not identical to social media addiction).
Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
They profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.
> Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:
- “Social media use is shown to directly cause significant mental health distress, especially to children. Continue? Yes / Close / Configure allowed applications”
I think some blame lies with whoever was paying for Facebook's internet access, and encouraged them to foist more of a predatory approach and cast a wider net than would have been possible otherwise.
There have always been so many people having higher integrity to choose from for those possessing better judgment of character.
Imagine being so out of touch that you think parents are generally equipped with the knowledge, features, and emotional capacity to manage their child's entire exposure to the internet in a way they cannot or will not circumvent. Laughable.
Imagine thinking parents stand a snowballs chance in hell fighting against products explicitly made to exploit their children from companies spending billions on it. It’s like 0.00001% of parents that has those skills, if that.
So if I write a book that your kid just can't stop reading it over and over again because I deliberately made it compulsively re-readable, and then your kid develops some kind of issues because my book is so interesting to him, you can sue me and win?
I don't like that idea. Personally, I value free speech more than some supposed "harms" done to children by content. Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
This is the part all the articles are glossing over. If the settlement terms include age (identity) verification, this is a big loss for everyone's privacy. The plaintiffs will take this template and apply it to other networks like Discord and push to normalize id collection everywhere.
There's a law against that. There's currently no law against making a website so fun that kids will waste all their time playing with it if their parents let them.
I'm not saying I'm against passing laws on this subject. My point is that no such laws currently exist, but a bunch of lawyers and judges just decided Facebook owes $17B for breaking these non-existent laws anyway.
There's an appreciable difference between creating a compelling work within an established medium like literature and inventing a (digital) machine that exploits psychological vulnerabilities (ie intermittent reward cravings) to keep the target engaged.
> Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
If staying away from social media is this trivial to you I applaud your self discipline but googling 'social media addiction' suggests a very real phenomenon where people, children and adults alike, often find themselves incapable of self regulating their usage.
It's established that exposing children to bad things causes harm. This isn't specific to technology. "Free speech" isn't a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children.
"Free speech" is definitely a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children. That's why there's no law on the topic; the Child Online Protection Act was overturned, and organizations like the EFF have been opposing recent attempts (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/house-passed-kids-act-...) to pass a new one.
This isn't regulation. If it was regulation, Meta could just read the regulation and comply and they'd be in the clear. This is the judicial branch making up and enforcing regulations that don't exist based on their own personal opinions about what causes "harm". No way to know what you need to do to comply until after you're already getting sued.
> personal opinions about what causes "harm
"
Source that it was their personal opinion?
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
So if a person at your company claims you're "causing harm" in a vague, indirect way that's not explicitly against the law, you're legally obligated to both agree with them and change your whole business model to accommodate that? Apparently yes, but I personally think that's pretty dumb.
And no I haven't read all the details, it's an extremely broad settlement that apparently covers everything from vague allegations of harm caused by social media addiction to Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data obtained through Facebook's API. There are too many claims to investigate all of them individually in detail without making that a full time job, so I'm speaking in broad terms here about how I think our legal system ought to function.
What in ?
> Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
What were they legally required to do after their research uncovered this "causal evidence" in your opinion? Shut down?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion about this specific situation.
> Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
No, because unfortunately our legal system doesn't work the way I'm saying it should. If someone feels you have injured them in some way, they can sue you even if you acted in good faith and broke no laws, and if they can demonstrate harm, even indirect harm, they have a good chance of winning. It makes for a very unstable legal environment.
Yeah, and all you perverts stop telling Grok to produce kiddie porn, because Elon is a free speech absolutist who absolutely believes in his own free speech, and your own personal responsibility to close his kiddie porn generation app. So if somebody uses it to generate pictures of your children, you can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
It's kind of funny that Facebook tried to launder its brand by renaming itself Meta, and its vile reputation is haunting that brand now too. New name is so abstract is sounds vaguely dystopian.
Not sure that it matters though, because Instagram and WhatsApp are still in everyone's pockets. Even in hippie circles, they're almost mandatory to stay connected.
I find it fascinating how spotty the evidence around "Social Media" causing harm seems to be (as opposed to: harm happening on social media because that is just where kids are now), yet how viscerally so many people seem to agree that it must be the case.
So a literal slap on the wrist that doesn’t discourage or stop the actually harmful behavior.
Look, I get that certain demographics are terrified of another Arthur Andersen-esque collapse of a firm, but if we don’t punish companies to the point of possible insolvency, then we’re creating a moral hazard wherein more companies will continue engaging in harmful behavior because they know they won’t ever be held properly accountable.
If we actually harmed (or even bankrupted) Meta with a suitable fine relative to the harms inflicted, you’d see the wider social media industry (and adjacent tech companies) clean up their shit really fucking fast to avoid a similar fate.
On the one hand, I think destroying Meta and social media in its current form would be a net good; same with fossil fuel companies.
Though you raise an issue (“what about folks whose livelihoods depend on the harm perpetuated”) rather than reject the premise using such reasoning, which is the absolute right attitude to have. It’s easy to sit on my high horse and tut-tut folks reliant on Facebook Marketplace or Gas Station Convenience Store shifts for their livelihoods, but that’s not helping jack shit. Personally, I believe part of the punishment should be leveraging the fines or damages collected to build social support systems for genuine victims - which includes working class folks who had to choose between starving/homelessness or survival. I lack the policy expertise to make specific pitches, but we do need to keep those folks in mind as a means of learning from Arthur Andersen and Enron: punish those creating the harm, while helping those who were casualties of the collapse but not directly complicit themselves.
It’s hard. It’s complex. Some folks will fall through the gaps due to our abysmal social safety nets. That being said, those numbers are infinitely smaller than the folks harmed by social media in its current form, and thus the trade is a net good.
Using this new problem to justify not addressing the current one is the worst move we could make.
Pathetic and toothless. Zuckerberg and all the scum like him should be getting all of their ill-gotten assets seized and his insides rearranged inside some maximum security prison, not this pathetic bullshit.
I mean downvote all you like, but you know there's a team in place already doing their damnedest to define dark UX patterns to enable them to technically meet the restrictions.
I’m beyond sick of how this country operates. This is small potatoes for Meta and stops the $1T+ lawsuit, which would have had an actual impact on these scumbags.
Time and time again it’s the same story: the Protestant worship of money and wealth at the expense of others. If it makes money then it’s a blessing from God, and thus cannot be evil.
Sorry, Americans, but your children will be mind raped with social media and pornography to grow the GDP. Don’t put up a fight: the government has their back. And an army.
You puritans are obsessed with porn. If you don’t like jerking off, then don’t! Hate yourself and leave the rest of us alone. You’re not protecting kids or anyone else with your moral panic.
Yup. Who brought circumcison into this country and why? Oh yeah, mad as hell conservatives who would literally mutilate their children all because gasp they might experience a bit of that forbidden, evil, no good, pleasure.
And after all, we are all sinners in a world of an angry god…
$16.6B versus $1.4T market cap (1.17%). So basically rob a bank of $100 million dollars, on your way out give $1.1 million to cops and you are free to go with the rest.
Financial settlements of what should be criminal cases should not be allowed. Hundreds or thousands of people at Meta should instead be jailed.
If we assume that the median income for a Meta employee/board member is 100 kUSD then that 16 GUSD is 160 000 man years. 16 000 people should go to jail for 10 years instead. And that should include everyone at the top.
Pay 25% from your 2025 profit for harming children since at least 2019 and be able to continue doing so. Sounds like a loss for society and a win for Meta.
The other article says: "OAKLAND, California, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Meta Platforms (META.O), opens new tab will pay up to $18 billion over the next decade" [1]
So it's 1.8 billion per year and that's a lot less than 25%.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-reaches-18-billion-set...
Exactly. Meta basically got out of this without any meaningful penalty or deterant for the future. Paid out to the 50 states, it only averages $36M a year per state. I can't believe all of the state AGs signed on for this no-op.
The pain inflicted is way worse than the cash. They now must make teens have aggressive time limits and time of day boundaries. Meta knows this means teens will leave forever to competitors and never come back as they age. That is a death sentence for them unless they can somehow convince their competitors to follow suit. I kind of hope the competitors laugh and watch Meta burn. Then each get sued to the same end individually.
Tiktok and YouTube are going to cannibalize Meta.
Except that the settlement includes making YouTube and TikTok implement the same stuff. The settlement amount stops by a third if the states don’t make their competition make the same changes.
The article outlines several changes Meta is having to implement that curbs the "and be able to continue doing so" argument a bit. That said, I wish these settlements included tobacco-esque requirements for ongoing funds to educate people. The tobacco settlement funds have been somewhat successful.
Have they?
I know a lot of my peers went to college for free with the Millennium Scholarship.
But so many young people vape now that it's becoming cool to smoke analog cigarettes. I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago. Many people that age now do.
In England, in 2000 25% of 15 year olds regularly smoked, by 2023 it was 2.5%
For the 11-15 group as a whole it dropped from 11% to 1.2%
Vaping in that 11-15 group was 5% in 2023
So combined smoking and vaping in young people halved from 11% in 2000 to 6% in 2023, almost all of which is vaping
https://ash.org.uk/uploads/Youth-Smoking-Fact-Sheet.pdf
https://ash.org.uk/resources/view/use-of-e-cigarettes-among-...
Maybe you know different young people now ?
I saw way more smoking 10-20 years ago. All have quit now.
I see a good amount vape but rarely see cigarettes these days
I can't go outside in Toronto without having to smell cigarettes/cannabis.
Analog cigarettes! I love how “analog” has become synonymous with everything more manual, natural, even or better.
My favorite is the “acoustic bike” instead of electric bike (the joke comes from guitars, I think)
I'll start calling normal chairs acoustic chairs now to stretch this joke even further.
ICCs? Internal combustion cigarettes
Alternative Meanings (Noun)Comparable Thing: Something similar or comparable to another thing (also spelled analogue).
Smoking tobacco is something people have done for centuries. Pretty unlikely that we'd eliminate it in a few decades.
smoking tobacco is bad, but smoking cigarettes is much, much worse because of all the extra shit that's added in to make them even more addictive (and more carcinogenic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_in_cigarette...
If you inhale the smoke, it's quite irrelevant whether smoking an industrial cigarette, pipe or a hand-crafted cigar without additives. You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough. Smoke is always carcinogenic.
I don't really get the point when there are many ways of getting nicotine without the smoke.
You're not wrong about smoke always being bad--there's a reason American Spirits have to have a disclaimer about "additive-free" not meaning healthier. Tobacco takes up alpha emitters from the soil and leaves them in your body--never good.
Pipe and cigar smokers are much less likely to smoke a pack's worth of tobacco a day. You also don't inhale them into your lungs, you hold the smoke in your mouth.
Smoking cigarettes is less about getting nicotine and more about having something to do when you are stressed etc.
Fun fact: the stress that smoking cigarettes relieves is only the stress caused by the addiction/relapse from nicotine. Surely, there might be some placebo effects going on, but nicotine is not a stress relieving chemical.
So really it is just about getting nicotine, but over time the ritual around the addiction adds to the addiction.
True, but I am vaguely aware of people taking like Zyn for performance enhancement reasons, and I don't think anyone starts smoking like that.
Zyn is freebase nicotine which does show some signs of being performance enhancing; mostly around focus. There are a lot of people with unmedicated ADHD self-medicating with Zyn, or vapes, or smoking due to the this.
Well, I suppose less radiation could be one of the advantages of a crack habit
I don't smoke, but when I've talked to smokers a lot of it is about the ritual. Filling the pipe, cutting and smelling the cigar, or removing the cigarette from the pack, tapping it, lighting it up, the taste and smell of the smoke, it's all part of it not just the nicotine.
It’s true and smoking marijuana is arguably as harmful as cigarettes but the pro-weed crowd throws a fit any time anyone points that out.
That’s not true. The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%, not “probably” (somewhere between 15 and 30 times higher risk than a non-smoker).
In fact, only about half of smokers die prematurely from their smoking.
I mean, I’m not saying start smoking, but also let’s at least have accurate facts.
> By age 80y, an estimated 48.3% of current-smokers (41.1% never-smokers) will develop cancer, and 14% will develop lung cancer [0]
"The lifetime risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is about 10-20%".
Yup. That's probably true. It is also incredibly misleading, because that isn't the only cancer you are at risk from. So... I wouldn't call what you just said, an accurate fact.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.33685
OP said: “You'll probably get lung cancer anyway if you continue it long enough”.
That’s not true, and is why I focused on lung cancer. Don’t forget that smokers don’t just die of cancer, so even if we take your source, we still don’t have the proper picture.
That’s why I also added the point that about half of smokers die prematurely due to their smoking, because I was not planning to exhaustively list every possible cause of death which could be caused by smoking.
Europeans started smoking tobacco in 1492 and it spread super fast.
It probably can't be eliminated completely, but if they slowly make it illegal for young people to start the habit it can be reduced
We've been harming children for even longer
> I barely knew anyone who smoked 10-20y ago
What country?
In a lot of the US, smoking sections still existed in restaurants then.
Just checked my home town, some bans were enacted in 2014 and existing restaurants and bars are still grandfathered in!
Vaping is distinctly less harmful than smoking.
We don't actually know that yet. The main studies are still ongoing, because this tends to be the kind of thing you measure over decades, and we haven't had those yet.
Does it increase the risk of Alzheimers? Does it riddle your brain with cancer at a later stage?
We don't know.
We do know that it is short-term less harmful, than something where most of the concerns are long-term.
Smoking's harms are observable in the short term! You don't need long-term longitudinal studies to show smoking is bad. And we have known mechanisms for that harm that relate to combustion. We know mechanically that vapes are not combusting plant material, and we also don't see the same kinds of obvious harms in the short term. It takes willful blindness to the ills of smoking to suggest that vaping might be as harmful or more harmful than smoking.
It takes "wilful blindness" to suggest vaping can be understood completely today.
We already know there are unexpected side-effects. Like kids starting to go blind, when they start young.
I didn't use Alzheimer's as a random example above. There is a known correlation.
So... Maybe it isn't combusting plant material. But it is probably causing brain damage in some form or another - and that is precisely the kind of symptom that requires a longitudinal study to understand the impact!
I actually do not know if this is true.
Vaping is not healthy but there is a lot less material inhaled. No fine particles which do real damage.
So vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters.
>Vaping is not healthy but there is a lot less material inhaled. No fine particles which do real damage.
Propylene glycol covers the alvoelae and over time (~15-20 years) blocks uptake of oxygen, causing respiratory failure and a slow, painful death.
Vegetable glycerine coats the lungs and over time (~10-25 years) blocks fluid from draining out of the lungs, causing congestive heart failure/pulmonary edema. Which ends up causing one to drown in their own bodily fluids and a slow, painful death.
If you disagree, please cite any long term studies that disprove the above. Thanks!
I do not disagree, but can you cite the studies proving this?
Also proof that people did die from respiratory failure due to propylene glycol inhaling?
You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
>You shouldn't ask for disprove studies if you don't provide proof studies.
My point was that we don't know what the long-term effects of vaping are. Because there hasn't been time for the longitudinal studies that will tell us what those effects are.
I requested studies refuting those claims because I know they don't exist. I also know that studies confirming such claims don't exist either.
Making the statement that "...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters" is disingenuous because we have no idea what long-term (note that qualification) effects vaping does or does not have.
It might be that vaping increases human lifespan by 80%. Or it might be that vaping decreases lifespan by 25%. Or it might be that vaping either causes or prevents dementia. We just don't know. It may be that none of those things apply. Who knows? Not me. And not you or anyone else. Yet.
Because vaping hasn't been widely used for long enough to make claims about its long-term effects.
My claims are just as valid as yours ("...vaping is still unhealthy but less than smoking plant matters").
That was my point. My apologies for expecting you to make the conceptual leap and understand the above by making similarly unsupported claims as the one you made. I guess that wasn't the best way to do so. I'll try to do better in the future.
I hope I've cleared up your confusion.
Im not confused. A lot of the context you are inferring is just in your mind.
It's funny to see someone invent a narrative then have a conversation with himself while trying to gaslight another person that they invented the narrative.
I suspect (anecdote) vaping is just as bad if not worse. People vape EVERYWHERE. Almost any place you can't smoke, people still vape. So - that it happens that way makes me think the total exposure is a lurking problem.
The changes seem based on age, which just makes it more imperative that phone manufacturers perform even /more/ reliable age verification...
The business model, incentives, and practices that led them down this road? No, those don't need to change.
I just bought a $50 Android phone, quad core, 8GB RAM, 1 year of mobile service (albeit limited, but free WiFi is everywhere).
Have all the age restriction you want. A kid goes into the store with their lunch money (a few days worth) and they have a valid phone number and an unrestricted device.
Everything requires ID to use? I’m not sure what the answer is, but I agree.
And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.
Somehow I have no faith that these changes will be enforced, or appropriately drawn up by parties who actually have the knowledge to do so.
Interesting point. Clear and visible warnings similar to tabacco and gambling websites (at least here in NZ) would be great. A clear and explicit call out of the dangers and a direct link on how to get help would be a good place to start.
I really like the idea of small scale social media, that's focused on small groups of like minded people and communities, but damn Facebook is a cesspool of not-that.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
Is anyone the slightest bit surprised? Our courts are no longer effective at bringing justice. They only have the law, and the law flagrantly favors the rich and their pet corporations.
This was a settlement. The court did not get a chance to issue a ruling or do any of the things you're pretending to be angry about.
When the threat of winning in court is reduced, you get weaker settlements. These two factors are directly related to one another.
> META Total Annual Revenue in 2025: $200.97 billion (up from $164.50 billion in 2024).
They literally don’t care.
And while they paid a reasonable amount of tax in 2025, that was a one off. They normally pay 3-5%.
Yeah but politicians get to claim this is a win. Let's be honest, that's the real reason the prosecution went for a deal this small.
Meta has the pocketbook to appeal this to a non-jury setup where they'd be more likely to win (imo most juries are ready to agree to any penalty on social media companies for any reason)
And if people do not think Meta settled without input from the Trump administration and a possible reward for doing so, well, I got this bridge in Brooklyn to sell you, barely used.
I wonder which way Facebook's algorithms will tilt in this years mid-term elections....
Maybe, but I'm not sure how that might work. Meta was being sued by states in federal court, here--not the federal government. Is the theory that they would have paid more in penalties had not the White House pressured the federal court in Oakland (who aren't necessarily nominated by/beholden to Trump) to reject bigger demands from the plaintiffs? Or is the theory that the White House influenced the plaintiffs' (states) lawyers to offer/accept smaller settlements than they would have otherwise? Or that the White House pressured Meta to accept a larger settlement when they ordinarily would have fought more (in which case, I don't understand what Meta gets: they lose this case and then you theorize they'll help manipulate elections in favor of the group that forced the loss)?
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just another anti-Trump conspiracy theory?
> Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands...and your plan is to blackmail this person? [pauses, smiles] Good luck.
Yeah, they should at least pay it to the children.
For rich people, fines are just the price of doing things
The children are free to file their own lawsuit to get money.
Not a bad idea!
This is what the DC budget (Washington, as opposed to data center) is for.
The US politicians class is corrupt and captured by special interests. These 17B were already as provisions on their balance sheet. They will spend four times this in the next data center....
Why 2019?
Facebook was already immensely popular a decade before that.
May depend on whether their profits come from less than or more than 25% of 'children-harming'.
> knowingly and willingly harming children and adults
ftfy
Inexcusable behaviour and Meta needs to be skinned. These measures are a joke.
I dunno, I kinda feel they have to pay the price for governments not having applicable regulations on this kinda stuff.
It's not reasonable to expect them to put up rules their competition don't have to abide by, and if the government has 0 rules regarding social media, what should they do?
They're not solely responsible for phone addiction but none of their competitors get sued the same...
You can't use the word "reasonable" when dealing with companies with more power than most governments
Yeah, exactly.
Who can expect smol bean Meta to not act like rapacious vultures when all the other social media corporations get to?
So what should the law be? Don't be negligent? Don't be reckless? It already functions that way. Do we need to have statutes expressly dictating what people are allowed to do?
>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 cigarette like warning pop-up when you try to enable the algorithms.
(I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how and then cop out when they learn you have to download custom apk. Just add these functionalities as an default )
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?
>Is it not possible for people to just delete the apps and stop using them?
Some people have friends, and some people also have friends that are very distant (geographically, life style, stage of life, etc).
Social media can allow you to keep in touch with these people in a very convenient way. For me, being able to see life updates of friends with 8h+ timezone differences is very nice perk, because planning a call or having energy to chat with someone that far away is tricky and many people understandably then drop it if that's the only way. (same applies if I want to talk to my digital nomad friend or, new-dad-overwhelmed friend). It's much easier to facilitate meeting up when I'm traveling too.
But even for people that want to use it for that purpose only, FB/Instagram will shove down infinite scroll and stories/reels/updates of people/entities you can care less about.
And yes for some it is hard to have "the willpower" as you want to frame it. (although we know it's not so much willpower, from addiction studies around nicotine and how loss of socialization around smoking usually is a detriment to quitting smoking for example)
And yes just removing / blocking those features help. There are also unofficial side-loadable app out there. So for me it works.
And for your life maybe there's no loss in socializing by just walking away. Good for you. But maybe the examples can shed some light in how social NETWORK (social media before algorithm and attention economy) is useful for many in different predicament than you, while the social media aspects, many would rather opt out.
And unfortunately only a select few of my friends (nerds/techies) are outside it (signal, discord, good old email) but almost everyone at least have an account. Many of the people I know move often enough that phone numbers aren't even a reliable way to keep in touch
People who don't use social media to catch up with distant friends and family just ... phone or video call.
No addiction, no infinite scroll, no exhaustion, no casino-like mechanics, no endorphins, no political rage, no AI companions, no random posts, no influencers.
Or e-mail, or chat in a video game, or a shared photo album, or blogs, or so many other things that the Internet still makes quite easy.
Or go super old school and send a handwritten letter.
We've stayed in touch with eachother's social groups via various means of communication since antiquity without social media algorithms.
We need to re-normalize not knowing what is going on in someone else's life 24/7, and re-normalize not having 24/7 instant access to another person. It's not healthy.
Also, text messages don't need an instant response, nor should the other party expect an instant response. It's asynchronous communication for a reason!
You describe the apps as though they are recreational drugs with no other purpose but to produce endorphins. These 'apps' have a high level of utility - which is, I imagine, why most start to use them in the first place.
The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
My neighbors and school parents all coordinate via WhatsApp. The sky will not fall no, but if you don't join those groups you wouldn't know about upcoming HOA meetings, school events, important forms to fill etc.
Facebook is useful for bigger communities like moms groups. We found babysitters that way.
One of my social clubs tried to skip out of social media and was originally meeting in person, calling each other etc, but information just fell through the cracks as the club got larger.
WhatsApp is not Facebook and Instagram - at least not yet.
A lot of small businesses use these platforms for outreach. Without them they wouldn't have an avenue to reach and stay in contact with customers. An example would be a potter showing their work on Instagram and then linking back to their Shopify website.
Big tech literally has fingers in every single pie imaginable and it's real money for a lot of people, unfortunately.
Yeah, that's a very good counter-argument. I recently talked to a potter exactly like that, they said Instagram is their primary sales channel. Unlike for me, for them leaving would have significant financial consequences. The majority of users are not in this situation though.
Things would be a massive PITA without WhatsApp for me. I guess iMessage/RCS would do, or one of the many alternatives, but in the UK, WA is the messaging platform.
I vibe coded an app to help me manage my Toastmasters groups and WhatsApp API made it really easy for me to nudge people when needed and ask for volunteers or confirmation of attendance.
Honestly speaking I would not be in a leadership position for my Toastmasters groups if I needed to call each individual member every week as my other Toastmaster club does. That probably says something about me, but I'm sure many other folks would have a similar outlook.
Strange argument, you could say the same for almost anything.
Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
> The utility is not of existential importance. Yes, you can uninstall Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and the sky will not fall, life will just go on.
>> Similarly to how you can just eat less and lose weight.
I'd argue it isn't similar in an important way, people cannot opt out of eating entirely. Overeaters must eat. People who can't control themselves with social media do not need to use them at all.
You're making an argument about self-control in a conversation that is explicitly about factors other than self-control.
No they don't, not really. They are endorphin machines as you said. The perceived utility is a false perception caused by their being endorphin machines.
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...
HN is social media only in strictly technical sense of the term.
HN isn't optimized daily for engagement like FB and IG are. There isn't a single image, or video on website. Ads (for YC companies) sometimes show up and are rare. Color scheme-wise it is very plain (and should stay like that). HN is not hidden behind login wall. It is not tracking you. You can access HN fully anonymously, and create throwaway accounts for posting.
there's no need to "optimize" it already has the basic loop. stochastic reward (interesting news, interesting comments/replies), gamification (points go up!), and no real social interaction. (no connection, some performative elements, ie. comments are written not just to one known person or a small group of people you know.)
the things you mention all exploit this loop for monetization. I agree it's great that HN is not, but that doesn't mean it won't tickle our brains.
HN is monetized indirectly by advertising VC stuff, also by removing things that contradict government narratives or billionaire narratives
HN isn't social media at all because it doesn't have a social graph (you can't follow people here).
Sure you can. Click a user, see their comments, submissions.
I would say hn is in a group of systems that include Facebook.
It's true that contemporary commercial social media tends to be associated with these big corporate services that have already been thoroughly enshittified.
But they didn't start out that way - and alternatives are possible and desirable (hn, lobste.rs, many niche forums, IRC channels, discord servers[d] etc are proofs by example).
Maybe a loose definition would be communication system that leverage the network effect?
And good social media aligns with the end-user, and bad aligns with user-hostile forces?
[d]: (I don't particularly like discord, but it is much closer to a tool that does what I want: connect with people - than something like tick-tock or Facebook as it exists today)
I don’t understand either. Usually someone responds with something like “the local <whatever> only posts updates on <app> so what choice do I have” or something to do with peer pressure or FOMO. I don’t doubt that people deal with those problems but they seem like better ones to have. But it seems like a lot of people just cannot imagine living without the apps anymore.
Facebook is intentionally designed to be as addictive as possible. It's not just FOMO, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24579498
> Is the addiction so strong at this point that people don't have the willpower to stop?
Yes. I've stopped Facebook and Instagram, and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube. I've failed to cut those out as well. The addiction is a lot stronger than we'd all like to assume in my opinion.
> and it simply got replaced by more time on HackerNews and YouTube
I don't disagree with you at all, but doesn't this go against what most people are claiming in this thread (that Meta products are uniquely engineered to be addictive, to a significant degree)? Hacker News doesn't have any especially "addictive" features. They don't make money off this site, there's no ads, there's no personalized algorithm, no promotion of ragebait, etc. Yet plenty of us use it day after day or find ourselves distracted by it.
Youtube is more obviously addictive, but it's hardly social media. It's just media.
Meta has done a lot of harm in the world, don't get me wrong, but I think people are stretching a bit when they act like none of these technologies would be addictive on their own if not for the company's design.
Upvotes, downvotes, trending, there's still an algorithm on HackerNews.
Meta is the one being sued currently, obviously they are the biggest one, and have tried even harder to keep users coming back in addictive ways, and likely targeted children more directly.
I'd say HackerNews also has better moderation where they actively will remove ragebait, where Meta services often encourages it.
I see your general point though, but I don't think people act like these technologies wouldn't be addictive separate from some corporate endorser. A homemade cigarette is still an addictive cigarette, but that doesn't stop you from suing and regulating tobacco companies.
The other question you might raise is, what alternative isn't addictive? I think many have said that feeds should simply be chronological, same for comments. Instead of upvote/downvote, there should be reviews (score how much you liked the video/article), and users could sort by review score as well. You shouldn't be allowed to push content that users didn't explicitly subscribed too (ads should be ads on the side, not promoted content injected into your feed for example). And so on. Is it too restrictive, maybe, I think it's an interesting debate to have though, like what do we lose/gain making it less addictive, and what is actually less addictive?
I beleive I deleted facebook in 2013ish.
If I need to access for some business reason, I have a fake account. Otherwise I have zero desire to be on social media.
For my son, I built a web site based on my dog. The dog aka Prof Nubbs. Essentially it's a dogs against social media, if you on social media then you are not playing with your dog! Dogs against social media.
Just. That word again.
So why don't you just override your monkey brain that hordes of clever people trick in to scrolling more? Why don't you just get all of your social circle to move off Meta? Why don't you just use Ebay over FB Marketplace? Why don't you just convince your housing development to use something other than WhatsApp for sharing equipment? Why don't you just find a different channel through which to promote your small business? Why don't you just accept to be a social outcast?
The vast, vast majority can't pay that price.
And yes, some programmer somewhere has his programmer friends in Matrix. And no, that doesn't work beyond that very case. Why is this so hard to understand?
You fall out of society, basically. In my circles, most people expect everyone our age to have Instagram, even though it's been blocked by the government since 2022.
As far as I'm concerned, the algorithmic part that shows me content from strangers is a tacked-on extra, and not a very welcome one.
Are you actually in society by using Instagram, or do you just feel like you are?
Which society?
I deactivated Instagram about 6 months ago and while there are definitely benefits I also miss out on a lot of local events and updates. It can be a useful tool if done right.
That being said I never use any of the features that feed you new content - strictly used it for people I knew in real life and events / local fitness groups / etc.
Facebook I deactivated way back and never looked back. Maybe it was useful in 2008
In some countries there is no alternative. News, events and many businesses only publish on social media
Yeah, I currently live in one of those countries where businesses only post on facebook. I do fine without it. If I need something I google it and it shows up on google maps. I only see what I want to see instead of being inundated with unwanted ads from irrelevant businesses.
How do you get news and events? I mean yeah I can just ignore businesses
Most news is unnecessary noise that most normal people can do nothing about so why waste emotional cycles reading that? For everything else, like important weather alerts, holiday events, etc, I go to the weather website for my country and for events I see signs up around the city. I keep up with tech news by reading HN, financial stuff I can find on yahoo finance, and for global stuff, which I rarely check, I read Ground News.
Where I live there are no signs for events
Ground News was shown to be a right-wing psyop and an AI slop machine, FWIW. It also doesn't deliver the value it says on the tin, since you can't actually read the articles it links to unless you have subscriptions on those sites.
it may be possible for some people, I don't know.
does Meta have internal research that uses the word addiction that would come up in discovery? probably.
so there's more than one side of this. a little bit of a chance in the health & science department, a little bit of a chance in the legal department, that the plaintiffs would prevail.
that said, are people willing to ban alcohol and tobacco fully? and most "recreational" drugs? the cultural side is the least informative, because you can't litigate culture, it's arbitrary, hypocrisy is the rule, not the exception.
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.
> 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.
They do not want to give you the best digital experience you can have, they want to give you the most addictive and exploitative digital experience they can legally get away with because they value the money that brings in more than they value anything else. They'll be content to see you hurt or killed if it makes them more money. They've knowingly been hurting and killing people, including children, for money. Meta, and the corporations like it, have leveraged all of their vast resources against the average person and the average person is always going to lose in that situation.
Yup - “best”.
As in an experience so tuned to our hind brains that we are enraptured, past our ability to be concerned or switch off.
I’m being minimal in my invective and generous in my choice of words.
There is no fair fight against a corporation for an individual.
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 room. That worked like a charm. Today, there are all kinds of parental control features instead.
However, how can you expect people to do parenting, when grown adults are apparently not even capable of basic self-regulation?
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 self-regulation are the ones complaining about the possibility of having their dopamine toys taken away.
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.
It's the same thing. Parents improve their children's "self-regulation" by using the courts to make sure the world isn't full of addictive junk.
> The only thing I'm asking for is better control over my social media
Filter-tipped instead of unfiltered cigarettes basically.
"I know you can do this with custom apps and I'm doing that but you have no clue how many non tech people beg me to share how"
Wait...I'm in tech and I'm begging you to share how. Is there a way on iOS?
I've mostly just stopped using these apps.
iOS app installation (what some people call "side-loading") is done by signing up as a developer and then installing the apps as if you're developing them. You have to refresh them every 7 days in Xcode or they'll get deleted from your phone as that is one of Apple's anti-using-developer-mode-to-actually-install-things measures, and you can only install up to 3 apps this way, though apparently there's some kind of chameleon app that wraps multiple other apps with a menu.
"So meta won."
Unless we make sure in print to specify "Meta, the company found to have harmed children, …".
So what? Media can write "Donald Trump, the confirmed child rapist and embezzler" but it won't actually make anyone stop liking him.
the only thing I'm asking for is better control over my cigarettes. Let me remove all the carcinogens, addictive substances and dont let me inhale things that are hazardous for my health. And do this by default on all cigarettes!
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It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.
The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.
I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.
What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".
I think you are conflating "the best data we have" with "sufficient data to prove something".
I agree with you that the best data we have is inconclusive. Which doesn't mean social media is totally safe. Also it doesn't mean it's totally dangerous.
It means there just isn't enough data to let science guide the decision. Science is very slow and very expensive.
So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
> Which means, IMO: (1) regulation should be limited to what the general public's gut on average agrees with, since science won't be the neutral arbiter we want it to be for the foreseeable future. (2) I personally want to severely limit my kids access to social media because my gut says it's addictive and harmful. But I don't expect society as a whole to agree with me on that.
Well:
(1) there is no "the general public's gut" -- the general public is millions of separate guts that don't agree with each other;
(2) our political system defines explicit boundaries for the reach of regulatory power, especially where communication, expression, and social interaction are concerned, regardless of anyone's gut feeling on these issues;
(3) science can't be the arbiter here at all, since science only answers "is" questions, but this is an "ought" question; which leads us to
(4) as you alluded to in your final remark, this is a purely cultural issue which families/parents must address according to their own normative values, independently of each other, and there is no legitimate political or legal question here.
Something like 82% of parents and 70% of people want social media to be banned for under-16s. How much more agreement do you want?
See point (2) above.
In your view should it be legal to distribute child porn if you didn't make it?
Ah, an outlier edge case! I'll go ahead and address this one while taking note that using extreme outlier examples is not a good method for testing general-case principles.
In the case of child porn, the legal theory behind suppressing its distribution, not just its creation, is that distributing it reinforces the incentive structures that motivate its creation, which is where the actual harm inheres. So suppression is justified as a means of stopping assaults against children, not merely because the thing itself is regarded as harmful to the user.
This might be a rationalization for suppressing something that the vast majority of us find disgusting per se, but if so, then the motivation to rationalize it in relation to a more concrete harm means that we are rejecting the notion that most of us finding it disgusting is a sufficient justification in its own right to suppress things.
In other words, it's still something that, even if the motivation to suppress it originates from the "gut feeling" of a large number of people, acting on that gut feeling must still be gated by legal/constitutional norms that set the bounds for the assertion of power. So even as an outlier edge case, this one still conforms to the general principle, respecting boundaries even as it tries to go as far as possible within then.
So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm. Why not also in the social media case?
> So in the child porn case you're willing to concede that limits on power don't matter, shouldn't exist, or should be overridden, in order to reduce harm.
No, I'm not. I'm not certain as to whether I didn't explain my position well, or you misunderstood it, but I definitely was saying the exact opposite of this.
For the sake of clarity, I'll attempt to reiterate my point here: the child porn example demonstrates that even if the "gut feeling" motivation to restrict something comes from an underlying disgust at the thing itself, the legal mechanisms used to restrict it are still gated by limitations on the use of power.
In this case, the strength of the motivations pushed the restrictions further than they go in other cases, but not beyond the bounds of the strict limits, because those limits absolutely still hold, do matter, should exist, and should not be overridden.
> Why not also in the social media case?
The position you articulated here is valid in neither case.
I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.
> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.
Doing nothing seems fine!
I agree. Whenever everyone thinks something is true, we should be skeptical that it's true. Since everyone hates Putin so much, we should be skeptical that he is actually bad. Since everyone thinks the sky is blue, it must actually be green.
That seems like a very lame claim, given that Social Media is data in abundance by design, and for at least 2 decades now.
Having seen the increase in suicide rates for girls and young women [1], and having read the arguments for why no other explanation fits that data, I am convinced social media is indeed to blame.
But as someone else put it once regarding global warming, what's the worst case if we reign in social media anyway? That we make the Internet a less addictive place for nothing?
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/03/suicide-.... Archive version: https://archive.is/wY1OH
I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom". Also screw social media, it's bloat on society.
Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.
Are you sending kids to Facebook as an alternative to school?
Please don't try to derail the discussion. I'm clearly responding to:
>I'm confident kids before Facebook did not somehow have a "lack of freedom".
If you have an argument to make then do so.
I'm responding to:
> Of course they did? What do you think school is? Just because it's useful to society doesn't mean it isn't also a reduction in freedom.
where you compare the loss of freedom from school to the loss of freedom from Facebook
But I'm not making a comparison. The parent I'm responding to is asserting that kids before Facebook did not have a lack of freedom.
I am saying that school is a lack of freedom, therefore his assertion is wrong.
This is quite relevant when we're talking about depression in children. Eg from looking at South Korea we can see that the education system itself can be a cause of depression in kids, meaning that it's likely depressive in our countries too (just less than in SK).
This is completely different to my experience and my reading of the research. Please link me to any of this research you are talking about.
Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...
Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...
I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.
Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.
I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.
This is a pretty unimpeachable causal identification strategy finding Facebook's rollout caused worse mental health issues https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20211218
It's hard to do similarly high quality studies today because no one rolls social media out gradually anymore.
“There are studies that do not line up with my opinion but they aren’t as good as the studies that do” lol
I know that it's hurting me. Hard to imagine that children are any less affected by it.
Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.
Everyone is just such a 'big tech bad' sheep now. Pitchforks out.
> Anything to shift blame from parents, I guess.
Shifting blame from parents presumes there is a problem to blame on them, but isn't the determination of whether anything here constitutes a problem in the first place up to the parents themselves?
You're doing the exact same pitchfork thing but against the diffuse group of "parents".
Just seems odd to me that expecting parents to be held responsible for how their children spend their time is a "pitchfork" type of idea...
Well it is one. Also known as a thought-stopping cliche. Once you've found someone to be angry at - in this case "parents" - thought ends there.
uh yeah, parents are responsible for monitoring and... parenting their children.
ODB understood this dynamic years ago - "Wu Tang is for the children"
That's definitely why they chose to settle.
Would you like to link to these studies?
Society is not some science experiment that you can run for 20 years and hit the reset button.
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.
If you're on Android, install F-Droid and get one of the apps there that let you watch Youtube. No ads[1] and you can disable shorts.
[1] I'm not fundamentally against ads, but the Youtube ad situation has gotten ridiculous. They're far worse than cable TV ads.
For just the ads, there's also YouTube premium.
If I pay for a streaming service, I'll compare it with other paid streaming services.
Youtube is, for me, the worst streaming experience - by a significant margin. Terrible curation. Terrible recommendations. Terrible UI. No way would I pay for it.
(Oh, and if I paid, can I get it not to show me any Shorts?)
Don't necessarily disagree - I have premium because of Google Music (although the official app is now so bad I use Metrolist).
I don't see YouTube as a streaming service - more as a social(ish) video sharing/Indy publishing platform.
For things like conference talks or training techniques and so on.
If I had to watch ads, I'd stop using it.
> more as a social(ish)
But that's the hook of social media, isn't it? Be media, but make it look social. The most popular YouTube creators get paid millions - it's their full time job and they have a team of staff. That's no different than Netflix.
(Originally it actually was social, but by now, not for at least a decade)
I'd be happy with it as a service where I search for a video, and get a decent result, and not see shorts.
In particular, what I don't want to see is a hundred videos where all the person does is use clips from other videos as background and just states talking points. An example is searching for "2026 Ioniq 5 Review". I'm looking for someone who test drove a car, and is reviewing it. While those exist, I get a lot of videos from people who've likely never seen the car, and are just narrating talking points from other videos. The video is spliced stuff from other videos, and the audio stream is that of the narrator.
Pure waste. This happens over, and over again for any review I search.
If I get so much crap when I'm searching, why the #$I&%(* would I pay them money?
I found a good solution. In the YouTube settings you can turn off your watch history. It’ll want you that your recommendations will not be as good. You can watch a YouTube short, but when you try to scroll to the next one, it’ll tell you that there is no next video because watch history is not enabled.
The Unhook extension on Firefox does a very good job of hiding various parts of YouTube (including Shorts) that you don't want to see/access.
I use the YouTube app very rarely, but out of curiosity I went to iOS YouTube app settings, and I wasn't expecting this, but apparently in Time Management you can set Short Feed limit to 0 and this hid shorts completely from my YouTube app home feed and I can't scroll to the next Short when I open one.
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.
Exactly. And also a way to opt-out of the comment section. It's hard for me to resist looking at the comments, and sometimes commenting.
I find myself, including this thread, reading comments like snacking on junk instead of even opening the actual article. Dodging the long form content that might not be so easy to digest for the familiar site and short form comments isn’t a habit I’m proud of
Nebula has many of the better creators from Youtube.
Nebula has no comments section. I find this to be a big indicator that it is built to enable creators to deliver good videos to their fans, rather than serving some other master.
Indeed, but it shows they're not "innovative" as in not willing to iterate on their platform to maximise user satisfaction. They see it as, essentially, a folder full of mkv files. Which you could also publish, but nobody would actually use it just like nobody uses Nebula. I subscribe to Nebula because I think we need to incentivise that kind of project but I don't actually use it.
Delete your HN!
Youtube comments is a junkyard compared to HN.
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Absolutely! I had to sign out from YouTube on mobile (I was only using YouTube via browser anyway, not the app) to reduce the time I spent watching them. After signing out the shorts are so random I lost the interest in them.
I use brave browser on iOS which has a feature to block YouTube shorts. It’s clearly a cat and mouse as YouTube keeps changing the selector but works 95% of the time
Oh, for sure. I have to actively prevent myself from opening one cuz once I pop I really just can't stop.
Agreed, YouTube Shorts and similar pap (e.g., Tik Tok) seem corrosive to a developing mind...the mindless content, automatic looping, serving up one shallow video after another. It's no wonder the tech CEOs insulate their own kids from this stuff[1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/technology/silicon-valley...
There is a way. Disable your viewing history and puff, shorts are gone
Not just kids. With one of my friends, even when I'm playing a game together with them, I'll sometimes hear some audio over their headset... there was a dull moment for like 10 seconds and they're already on their phone... "Are you watching YouTube Shorts again?" "No, this time it's Reels!" Shorts, reels, clips, doohickey whatever-the-fucks it doesn't matter what they're called, I hate it.
100%, Shorts are an abomination.
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 that.
>Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation.
No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put an outsized emphases on such affirmation, whether it's reputation, status, belonging, approval, prestige, attractiveness, respectability, yadda yadda yadda. Consumer culture and mass media were already firmly entrenched and doing a damn good job of turning those into visible measures of personal worth in the form of wealth, possessions, beauty standards, popularity, professional success, celebrity... I could go on and on.
Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that we were already amplifying, and perhaps sped-run that amplification.
I'd put it differently. The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This also makes us feel that we constantly need to work for these affirmations. If you don't post, no one likes you. This is not a Facebook problem, but Facebook built its business around it, so they deserve to be singled out.
>The affirmation we were accustomed to generally had some substance. If someone called, sent you a postcard, or met with you, it probably meant they cared at least to some extent.
For the Average Joe, absolutely! Completely agreed.
>Social media strips all that away to the point where affirmation costs no effort to give but also means nothing. Here's a test I like to recommend: don't post anything on HN, X, or Facebook for a month. See how many people notice or reach out and ask if you're OK. The most likely answer is zero. Hundreds or thousands of "friends", zero meaningful return.
This is what it had been like for celebrities, people of fame, of massive wealth, of great success/achievements, and so forth for a very long time. Cultures put those on a pedestal and encouraged people to want to reach for those same things, to want to be more than the Average Joe. We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
I don't think it's the same. People usually don't see their "relationship" with celebrities as peer-to-peer. They either look up or look down on them (i.e., idolize or hate). So the attention you get from fans as a celebrity is actually a lot more meaningful. People go to great lengths to tell you about the impact you had on their life and they don't forget you easily. The scale makes it awkward, but the emotions are real.
On social media, we usually don't care about the other person at all. Likes and comments are 100% transactional. I have thousands of "followers" on X. If I die tomorrow, they won't even notice. The space on their timeline will be filled by other content to retweet or like.
I always thought fandom was '3rd party.' Like, you have an actor in a high-exposure job, but the more the middleware companies boost the allure of any arbitrary celebrity, the more money they'll make. The actor may address 'the people at large' during press events, but by-and-large, don't really interface with fans all that much.
Parasocial
> We wanted it, and Meta gave everyone the ability to have it.
Slight modification: We wanted to feel good about things, and Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, took advantage of that to enrich themselves while gaslighting everyone that their manipulation and exploitation was totally ok and normal.
Its easy for people without a conscience like Zuckerberg to do that and laugh about it.
I would even go one step further: Meta, knowing exactly what they were doing, ended building an engine that maximizes ad-revenue.
It's really hard to disentangle Meta's actions with the overall push for maximum-profit-at-any-cost mentality of most societies we live in.
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. > [...] > Meta just put a big ol' bright spotlight on the worst aspects that *we* were already amplifying, and *perhaps* sped-run that amplification.
No, pick one. If it's the former, it's essentially the same as saying they warped society.
I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
>I agree that these traits are human and were there before social media, but amplifying, gamifying and exploiting addiction is reprehensible.
I never said that it wasn't reprehensible.
> Meta has warped society to think that life is meaningless without affirmation
> No, Meta just amplified it to the nth degree. Humanity has always put
Those statements are the same. Our species was not designed to deal with the pressures of a A/B tested content fairy, designed by the most well paid minds our most advanced societies have trained, running on infrastructure that is more expensive than the GDP of many nations.
There are bounds within which a system functions optimally. When pushed far beyond those bounds, indefinitely, it is absolutely accurate to say the system becomes warped.
This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”. And I personally find it to be a very lame excuse.
Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malicious actions.
>This is the “If I wouldn’t have done it, somebody else would have”.
This is a disingenuous read of my comment.
>Villains have agency, and deserve to get the blame for their malevolent actions.
On this we absolutely agree, especially in regards to Meta. Nothing in life is that black and white, and there's nuance - to ignore our culture's outsized desire for things like that as a part of what pre-disposes us to being addicted to Meta/et al's bullshit is a fallacy.
It is that amplification that is the problem. Everyone has a voice. But if one actor chooses which voices to amplify it is responsible for the results.
This episode will come to an end, only to be replaced by a more subtle - surely AI driven - form of amplification/attenuation.
Social media is manipulation. Period.
> No, Meta just amplified
No. "Just" is understating the effect.
Tobacco existed for eons, and then American tobacco companies engineered it to make it a hundred times as addictive with full knowledge of what they were doing. They intentionally created dependencies. I have no sympathy for them. This is too light of a settlement.
> 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...).
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 conducted by the same people and NOT capable of determining causation, but nonetheless the best publicized in the media - are real, but they are small.
so the stuff you are saying might be true, but the effect might be so small as to be meaningless. there are bigger threats to society than social media.
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!)
Obviously it's not healthy to plop down in front of a TV for hours ever day. The science behind what social media is doing to young brains is very real, and to compare it to gameboy is arguing in bad faith.
personally i reject any frame of mind that makes stubborn, labeled generalizations about kids based on one or a handful of interactions. the people who conduct their business this way: they are always projecting.
> one of these gen Z zombies that have fried their brain on their phone?
kids today..
"of all the animals, the boy is the most unmanageable" - Plato
Banning phones from schools only is not enough.
The people building the app didn’t know any better either.
Maybe at some point they realized how addictive and corrosive to society the app had become. But I don’t believe they set out with that as an end goal.
Meta is capitalism. You're talking about capitalism.
Capitalism forces parents to let their kids use their phones and social media all day?
Hm, odd. I didn't know parents didn't have authority or agency. Good to know.
Yes, do you think Parents spend every waking hour hovering over their kids?
Good to know how childless you are, or fortunate enough to grow helicopter wings.
The grift is strong when the marks are the fault. Black people are also at fault for living in a ghetto and getting addicted to crack served by the CIA in the 80s.
Yes, yes, it's all the addicts fault.
In fact I have 3 children, thanks! And controlling your child's screen time + social media is a very possible thing! It's called "raising your children".
Please stay on topic lest everyone get confused by your nonsense about unrelated topics.
People like you really do make the comments on HN quite bad. Do better!
No it isn't.
Okay, I don't like capitalism either
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The WSJ reports: "As part of the settlement agreement, Meta will also make sweeping changes to its services, Facebook and Instagram, including implementing a default two-hour time limit on its apps for users under 18."
The question is of course if these limits are enforced and if they are shared across other services.
So nice of them to let kids lose their minds 2 hours at the time.
Two hours is one hour too long if you ask me.
This should be implemented also for adults.
And non-avoidable.
Two hours is two hours too long.
Only if we make sure it applies to your HN social media time. After all, we wouldn’t want you to get too used to your own freedom and autonomy. We must remind you that random people like me must consent to you doing what you want with a social media platform!
They already must consent. By using HN you're subject to the terms of ICANN and Verisign.
Adults can’t decide for themselves?
There isn't some magical switch that's flipped on your 18th birthday where you suddenly be pragmatic and make rational decisions. Even into your 20s, your brain is still developing. My mother is in her 60s and addicted to facebook and tiktok. It takes significant willpower to overcome addictions for most people. The brain of an 18 year old addicted to social media is mashing the "do the feel good thing" button just the same as a 17 year old.
Seing how many adults have gambling addiction, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, food addiction, and social media addiction, I will say, not so much?
Adults want time limit they can set in the app themselves.
This is already a feature in instagram. Then it's also a feature built in the OS in phones.
What more are you looking for?
Adults should not be allowed to use heroin either.
You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already restricts what adults do on their phones. You can't buy drugs or look at CSAM. You can't use your phone while driving or operating dangerous machinery. You can't install apps which facilitate piracy. You can't wipe your phone when the state lawfully requests it from you. The list goes on.
>You can't install apps which facilitate piracy.
Initially read this as "can't install apps which facilitate privacy."
And that was before I got to your next sentence . . .
Are you saying that because laws exist, and it’s illegal to break the law while using your phone, that is therefore justification for making it illegal to scroll on social media for longer than an hour each day?
I didn't make that argument. I responded to the statement:
> You think the state should restrict what adults do on their phones?
The state already does that.
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> You know what point I was making
Try being as generous as you demand of others
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Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? You broke them badly in this thread.
We particularly want to avoid personal attacks and tit-for-tat spats, so if you could please avoid that in the future, it would be good.
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There's a big difference between "the state should start doing something that it does not do/hasn't ever done" and "the state controls something and it should change the way it does that".
That's not pedantry. That's the difference between "darn gub'mint won't let me land my private jet on the freeway" and "darn gub'mint lowered the speed limit on the freeway".
If you want to argue that the state shouldn't control phone use related to social media, you need to engage with the ways they already control phone use, and whether/how well those work (and have a complex conversation about the costs/benefits of adding an additional control); it's dishonest to frame it as a qualitative shift from not restricting what adults do on their phones to doing that.
No it's pure unbridled pedantry. The state does not allow you to use any object or thing to break the law, including your own body. Thus by your definition the state "controls" everything, making the distinction irrelevant.
Imagine making this same argument but for something like slavery: "Well, the government already controls what we can do with our bodies, so the concept of forcing some people to a life of hard labor will require you to engage with the ways they already control peoples bodies, how well they work, and we should have a complex conversation about the cost/benefits of this additional control. It's dishonest to frame it as a qualitative shift, it's more akin to the government lowering the speed limit."
We can also just say no. End of discussion. You nor anyone else gets to tell me what otherwise-non-illegal media I can consume.
But I think that's the point: the media should be illegal. Probably not to consume, but to produce or distribute.
No, but I sure as shit think it should be an opt-in feature that adults are aware of and can make a decision to turn on for themselves.
Why do you support a nanny state that tells adults what content they are allowed to consume?
The state already tells adults what content they can consume. Truth in advertising laws, pornography restrictions, MPAA ratings and age restrictions, pirated media, and so on. Even with a default of freedom of speech, the state has numerous subsidy/financial-penalty mechanisms by which it can and does restrict what content is practically available for consumption.
I'd prefer facebook to not give away free drugs to the drug addicts.
Social media is one of the most insidious addictions, it doesn't cost money and your physical health is largely unimpacted. The real impact is on society and the family. My Facebook addict mother could be talking to friends, reading a book, or doing anything mentally/physically/socially productive other than scrolling for hours looking at junk content and AI slop.
A parent of young children could be interacting with their kids and building lasting connections instead of scrolling through tiktok to watch the mommy bloggers interacting with their kids. Or alternatively, setting unrealistic expectations of what a good parent does for their children and basically saying anyone not doing the same is a bad parent. My parents loved me and gave me a great childhood but my working mom wasn't up at 4am making trad wife breakfasts and lunches in the kitchen. My wife likes watching that stuff. I always point out how fancy of a kitchen the trad wife has and that she can afford to spend hours a day baking and cooking because she is wealthy, doesn't need to work a 9-5, and likely has a nanny to take care of the kids while she's filming and editing daily content. These aren't baking recipes being shared, this is content implying that to be a good mother you need to only shop at Whole Foods and bust your ass in the kitchen for hours on end.
A young adult is consuming vast amounts of unrealistic body imagery (whether it's "fitness" influencers or porn) and harming themselves to achieve the same. Sure, a fat and ugly person doesn't attract the same views as fit and pretty person but it turns a dark corner when the algorithm starts pushing ED content.
Grandpa is addicted to false or misleading political feeds to the point where he's near militant in his support for someone that's more interested in leveraging identity politics for power and money than actually helping improving the life of someone like grandpa. I'm still convinced that the vast amount of radical/alarmist traditional and social media my grandfather was fed manifested into depression and contributed to his suicide.
I don't think there needs to be strong limits on the content itself. Maybe some restriction on outright lies if it's not presented as entertainment or fiction. But what needs to happen is some sort of rollback on how good these feed algorithms are. It's not really healthy and no one except the social media companies are truly benefiting at the end of the day.
Would've been cool if they had actual improvements like the timeline only shows people posts from their friends
and in reverse chronological order, so you can actually pick up where you remember leaving off previously. what a novel idea.
So nice of them to let kids lose their minds 2 hours per FB and 2 hours per IG each day.
It’s gonna be like micro dosing drugs. Like what kind of a lawmaker would think that’s okay
Probably default setting that can be changed by the under aged user. And probably per app or even per account.
Hey meta, watch my kids for me.
I raised my kids with devices. They hate social media for the most part, and participate in it begrudgingly.
All meta had to do to avoid this was run the occasional "you have been doom scrolling for 20 minutes, do you know what your kid is doing on social media" ad's and the problem would have been solved (for them). But parents would have to own their own social media addiction issues - Im reminded again of the old "I learned it by watching you" ad...
The earlier papers on the risk here date back to 2012. You can go all the way back to myspace and the Megan Meier case (2006) to know how things were going to turn out for kids, online, unattended.
Great meta pays the fine.
In 20 years this crop of kids will, as an outcome of therapy, go "no contact" with their parents, who refuse to own up to doing a bad job raising them with unfettered access to social media.
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.
To be fair, aesbestos makers too knew and didn't stop selling it.
So do sodium hydroxide makers, they know it's toxic and they still don't stop selling it.
It's not the same. Aesbestos makers knew, their customers didn't, and they actively fought against the customers knowing it. Whereas NaOH makers know and go as far as writing it on the packaging.
>the social media addiction stuff stand on pretty dubious science to say the least.
There are multiple studies showing that social media use leads to worse mental health in users.
Punishable by fine just means its legal for a price. Its disgusting
Well, they are being asked to make changes as well, which presumably prevents the damage.
It can be argued the changes don't go far enough so maybe "pay fine, reduce harm, but harm still permitted..."
a few weeks ago i was visiting my parents and caught a little bit of a documentary they had on.
it all became clear as day.
apparently in the 70s used car salesmen would manipulate the odometers in cars they were selling to make the cars appear to have really low mileage. they would also do other random stuff like put saw dust in the transmission to hide any kind of knocking noises.
the media started doing investigations into this which led to laws making those kind of things illegal.
they had tons of interviews with various owners of the car lot chains who were eventually found guilty of things like rolling back odometers. and every single one of them sounded sleazy and confident. every single one of these guys who were caught red handed blamed the buyers saying things like:
“it’s not my fault they bought a shit car.”
we allowed a bunch of greasy slimey used car salesmen to take over. slimey used car salesmen in quarter-zips who sound confident.
Only to children? What about adults? Yes, I know we are supposed to be more responsible, but this things are made to be addicted and you don't realize until it is too late.
Would be nice to be able to enable these features as an adult (stop autoplay videos and no algorithmic feed).
Also, I’m surprised by the lack of enforcement to remove infinite scrolling.
Yes, and also if only I could disable shorts and the comment section in youtube.
If you are on Android, you can use Revanced Manager or Morphe to patch the YouTube apk with all kinds of controls that include the ability to hide shorts and the comments section. Ad blocking works well too but using those patches requires a bit of a cat and mouse game since YouTube backend updates break things and require occasionally patching a newer apk version. You can also enable all of the client-side YouTube premium features.
Just tell it you're underage
I want sliders to control the feed.
1% of their market cap. I don't think we'll see someone with a net worth of $100,000 paying only a $1000 fine for harming children.
Market cap is generally the wrong measure. If you registered asf1254 Inc., and it was always just you, and it traded like Meta stocks trade, then "asf1254 Inc." would have a market cap ~6.2× whatever you're currently earning.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
You may earn 100k/y and have 10M real estate + 2M in bank. Why would you dumb down market cap to earnings?
Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
> Why would you dumb down market cap to earnings?
The point is "Market cap is BS".
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
Sure, sure. Put Zuck in jail and let's see if it's much smaller than $16 bn.
Would if I could, but I think you're missing my point somewhat.
Market cap isn't real money
it's funny how it's real money when it's useful and fake money when it's not
The sibling comment, talking about Schrödinger, is correct for the wrong reason.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
well that is Schrödinger's finance for you, they decide whether to say its fake or real based on their own benefit.
Then they may as well pay out 10% of the stock.
What % of META (shares) are owned by Meta Platforms Inc.?
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
Meta Platforms Inc. can create shares out of thin air.
Diluting existing shareholders by 10% would send a much stronger message than whatever's happening now.
The message being "screw the rules, I have money".
The shareholders already can't remove Zuckerberg, he has 57% of voting control.
It amounts to taking 10% of his wealth too, through dilution.
And by diluting all shareholders it depresses the price in the future.
That's like a court ordering 10% of your home be put on the market in a way that never forces you to pay rent, when you're likely to live in it for the rest of your life.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
> it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
> And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
So was Tesla until it wasn't: https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2024/06/1...
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
That's equivalent to saying they should give 10% ownership to the government.
First, that would be communism, and second, what would the government be able to use that for?
> that would be communism
That would be news to all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
> what would the government be able to use that for?
Even if the government didn't have such a fund, it could sell all the shares at once. Or slowly over time.
Money isn't real, yet that's how we size a lot of things.
You are absolutely right, they would commit fraud on an unprecedented level and get away with hundreds of millions!
If the handling of the Epstein files in the US is anything to go by, they’d get away scot free.
Why not just ban the engagement algorithm completely. Adults are just as susceptible to addiction.
Why not just ban all non government approved speech, less we hear something that might hurt our feelings or make us engage in wrongthink.
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.
Correct, the government can't ban mathematical algorithms. Just like they can't ban certain plants from being grown.
I actually don’t think banning “the algorithm” is the right solution either, nor are the identity verification disguised as age gates. But I would like to see the US government do something. I actually think Lina Khan was doing some good things.
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.
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Only when all those who call for bans also delete their HN and Reddit accounts.
reddit is trivial, but why hackner news as well?
what is "the engagement algorithm"?
Not GP, but I'd define it as anything which presents or orders/prioritizes user-generated content based on preferences not explicitly specified by the consuming user. That'd be something like "default to chronological friends-and-follows-only, with an option for friends-of-friends and an option for 'most liked within a time window', and (if Facebook is feeling magnanimous to a very few power users) a preference pane which allows controlling overrides to the chronological-ness like 'show posts up to X hours out of order if they have more than Y likes'". No recommendation/you-might-also-like system, but you can make the "accounts friended/followed by" button for a user's existing friends/follows as big as you like--so long as the list presented is only sortable only by name/follower count/date-added.
My hot take is that the courts should find that doing anything beyond that is a first-party editorial behavior and thus not immune to liability under section 230. You can operate social media, but if your content and recommendation sort algorithms aren't explicitly controllable by and legible to (that means no "you might like"; no direct payouts for content creators to be engaging on your platform; recommendations based on dumb sorts from people you already know or dumb sorts over keyword searches only) your users, you're liable.
Anything that engages users?
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I can’t wait for the equal coal reckoning. What is it 20k direct deaths a year? 2 million early deaths? The Great Barrier Reef 100% dead after this El Niño. A deliberate cover up of the science?
In a top 10 harmful corporation list meta wouldn’t make my cut.
My pet peeves are junk food corporations. Companies like Mac Donald's or Coca Cola have been extremely damaging in terms of public health. And the level of marketing they use to feed people (especially kids) their poison is insane. I know it's pretty unpopular as it can be seen by some as an attack on US culture, but definitely more damaging than Meta in my opinion.
In the UK there are fairly strong rules against advertising junk food to kids.
Of course these are all being subverted on social media because of Meta et al. being uncooperative and pretending they can't identify kids (they know the real age of most accounts even without having to do ID checks).
Fast food and snack companies are the absolute masters of marketing to children. If the United States really cared they'd put a blanket ban on advertising to children like some jurisdictions (Quebec) have done.
Completely agree. Talk about designing for addicted kids
>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.
Even if we assume children don't find a way around this, they will simply switch to a different social media app after their two hours are up, or switch to an app that doesn't have the two hour limit at all.
This is clearly a rule that would have to be mandated by the government, or perhaps parental controls on their devices (not sure why parenting was ruled out here apparently). Same with whatever opinions people have on an algorithm showing you content you'd enjoy, which has always been the goal of media since the concept of a magazine was created, they just didn't have the right tools available.
It also will only punish kids who actually gave their age no? That's not actually required (yet) to sign up for a social media app. I was probably 9 when I started clicking a random year for my age when signing up. Doesn't take you long to figure out you have to jump through hoops when your honest.
Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
I could see unregulated platforms blowing up, which would directly expose minors to far worse.
Like imagine if they all flock to 4chan, or similar.
4chan doesn’t use tricks to get people addicted to their feed. Similarly, most platforms cannot hire the smartest people to build addictive algorithms. The danger is much lower.
4chan doesn’t rely on likes or upvotes, and posts are ostensibly "anonymous" (not attached to a persistent identity). Instead, users earn their feel-good chemicals by the amount of attention they can generate, positive or negative, as measured in number of replies or impact on board culture. Threads themselves are kept alive based on how often they receive a reply relative to their peers, with each board having a set capacity for active threads; the least popular threads are quickly pruned out of existence.
This system encourages gamifying replies by creating content that elicits strong fear, anger, or excitement responses, or opinions or media so shocking that it’s impossible not to interact with them. Combined with a lax free-speech policy, you get a website that reinforces the nastiest, most unsanitized content, often far-removed from reality, which can exacerbate mental illness or depression among vulnerable populations.
While other social media platforms also encourage their creators to exploit fear, anger, or excitement, leaning too heavily on emotionality without being acceptable to your audience can cause your post to be buried or underperform. Emotional engagement is only one factor in success, alongside the like-to-dislike ratio, watch time, creator reputation, and palatability to advertisers. If you post, e.g., an emotionally provocative YouTube video that completely dismantles your audience’s preexisting conception of you (a leftist posting a right-wing video), the video will likely be dislike-bombed and thus unable to climb very far in the algorithm, while your reputation will be tarnished among your hardcore fans. Even on a more pseudo-anonymous platform like Reddit, going too far against the grain of a subreddit will get your post downvoted and hidden from anyone not sorting by new, and probably deleted by the mods.
4chan doesn’t have these issues. Even if you are outside the Overton window of a specific board, as long as the post has enough substance to fuel outrage (there is a difference between cheap outrage and more visceral, long-lasting outrage that can only be created by someone intimately familiar with the subject), your post can still be successful, although you will be bombarded with racial slurs and death threats. It’s ragebait in its purest form.
Disclaimer: I have never posted on 4chan and these are just my observations from lurking.
> Really I have no idea what this case accomplished besides being a tax on a successful company.
You forgot "evil" in your description of the company.
It is supposed to realign their incentives away from massively exploiting society for purely financial gain. There is ample evidence that Meta has gone out of its way to encourage the discussed issues, so clearly there was a problem with the incentive structure. Given all the lobbying they've done to prevent any passage of laws regulating their conduct, it's fallen to the courts to correct this (if, as other comments say, somewhat unsatisfactorily).
I think the damage that Meta has done not only to children, but to all human beings alive and online today, cannot be put into monetary terms.
Meta should be destroyed and forced to stop all operations immediately. I think it would be quite an interesting wake-up call when we would then realize that... nothing of value was lost and the world will just go on - just a little bit saner and happier.
> The company said 30% of that amount — about $5.3 billion — will be released to states only if rivals YouTube and TikTok meet two conditions: implementing similar safety features, including a one-hour daily time limit, a nighttime block and age-assurance measures; and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
This is pretty shady. The $17B figure is much less impressive when a huge chunk of it is hinged on competitors choosing to hurt their business.
For what its worth, if you believe Meta's product does do this damage, the other products which do similar things should also abide by it.
It helps simultaneously "level the playing field" but also protects consumers.
If the courts stated ruling is hinged on consumer protection then this seems fair. Any competitor which doesn't follow suit is likely opening themselves up to a similar lawsuit which would cost a similar order of magnitude of damages (so it is in the interest of the competitors to do take these actions)
It's basically contingent on the AGs suing those companies as well.
> and paying the same amount, split between the two companies.
So it's a bucket of crabs
The discussion here would be unchanged if only the non-contingent portion were reported ($11.7B).
Solution is not to have another app that is built on likes, nor on feeds. We have seen, even for adults the apps built to constrain the use of social media apps and devices are ineffective. Only way forward is to create opportunities for real time, conversations that are not chat based. It has also shown that people are less mean, when interacting in real time with a human as opposed to writing a short comment. Especially in US, where defaults are system are creating more walls between people, instead of creating more opportunities to interact in real time. People sit in car, from there isolated single family homes, and go to their destination mostly that way. There is no spontaneous opportunities to mingle with the neighbors, nor with new people at train stations or at town square. I built https://tosynch.com to do one thing, and one thing only : reconnect with friends and meet often. No likes, no feeds, no ads, no noisy notifications, setup and forget.
Can they be sued again, once psychologists agree to recognize social media addiction and algorithmic addiction as conditions on the DSM 5?
There is part of me who would love to see the style of internet created by companies like Meta regulated out of existence but the logical part of my mind recognizes this could lead to things like age verification laws, online surveillance and other much worse government controls over the internet.
Meta’s stock gained 32billion in value just today on the news. So it’s not even noticeable for them
the best remedy for abuses of big tech is to break them up, actually creating the conditions for a more free market rather one run oligopolies.
Who gets the money?
Well they're suing meta on behalf of the children. So obviously the children will be getting the money. Right? Right?
Doesn't matter as long as the children are safe!
Yup, exactly!
For context Meta had $61.8 billion revenue and $15.85 billion net income in Q2 2026. So this entire “existential threat” of teenage safety amounts to one bad quarter for the company, and they will continue on unscathed.
Meta pays smartphone makers to pre-install the Facebook app. And 3 more hidden services. Don't just remove the FB app, you need to remove all from FB because they will still continue to follow you.
The only good smartphone firmware is GrapheneOS. And LineageOS.
Shameful behavior. Anyone working on making these products more addictive or otherwise benefitting from their negative impact on society and politics should take a long hard look in the mirror.
From $1.2T lawsuit, they settled for $16.6B; Meta got quite a bargain
1% of market cap does not feel right for this. I guess to the general public $16 billion sounds like a lot.
Technically does this not create a problem for their EPS because of the poor free cash flow? Current market consensus is $81B in Net Income for the year but a -$6.7B cashflow for 2026[1]. But the stock is up 1%. So, is the -$12B is priced in(somehow)?
[1](https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/META-PLATFORMS-IN...)
It is over 10 years, so cash flow impact is ~1.8b per year if it was equal installments. Given that 30% is conditional on TikTok and YouTube agreeing to similar controls and paying similar amounts and other payment terms the number might be even lower for 2026.
Share prices are weakly correlated to news events anyway, if you ask the professionals they would say it was already "priced in" that is why a news event is not moving the stock when it doesn't move, and when it does move they will it is news event causing the move.
from meta's own statement: "The majority of the terms are required to remain in place for 10 years, but our Time Limit and Night Mode features will start with a five-year commitment. However, if industry peers sign on to the agreement, it will both extend this commitment to 10 years and prompt stronger default limits — reducing the Daily Limit to one hour per app and expanding Night Mode hours to 10:00 PM–7:00 AM (up from midnight–6:00 AM)."
I'm at loss for words at how shitty this paragraph reads. If anyone has any hope that Meta (and the rest) are even slightest concerned about the problem at hand (mental health of children), then they're very dim.
Meta literally goals on creating high-quality teen producers and consumers. Every single experiment, every single project is optimizing for that.
At least now its clear that behind the fancy marketing, its all "just business" for them and if they could, they'd sell the kids' soul to create "more shareholder value"
Shame; the states involved has an opportunity for actual redress of harms, as opposed to just some campaign-worthy soundbyte.
Meta's statement claims $18B. Not sure where Reuters is getting $16.68B from.
https://about.fb.com/news/2026/08/agreement-with-state-attor...
The other big tech companies were able to keep their settlement amounts private, since they settled before this case went to court. I wonder how their settlements compare. I bet they were much smaller given Meta took an actual L in court, they probably had less leverage when negotiating this number.
So should information be free to everyone or do we need to protect children from things they are not developmentally able to handle yet? It seems like a lot of the people praising this decision think the same thing is evil when applied in other contexts.
The question is, if social media isn't regulated or banned for children. Why are all the other thing we don't let children do still regulated/banned.
If a 6 year old can scroll TikTok surely they should be allowed to get a couple of shots at the bar?
I remember, vaguely*, a British polemicist once tilting at the eco-populist demons-du-jour by saying “it’s not carrier bags that are the problem, it’s supermarkets, and it’s not SUVs destroying the plant, it’s cars.”
In that spirit, it’s not Facebook that’s crippling children’s brains, it is phones and the apps that run on them. OLEDs, Retina, 120+Hz, infinite scroll, algorithmic content, and 10h battery life are all just as much to blame as Instagram stories.
It’s like recognizing over-fishing is a crisis which needs to be tackled and then suing McDonalds because they sell a lot of Filets-o-Fish.
If we were to do something then we could hold our leaders accountable for regulating all of this, but there’s such an enormous conflict of interest there (namely that they’d be regulating the golden goose that gives them so much tax revenue and economic investment) that I long gave up hope they’d play it by the book.
* Rod Liddell? Giles Fraser? Nick Ferrari?
There may also be an issue of objective divergence. We don’t actually know if kids’ brains are being ruined. All we know is that they’re different—probably better in some ways and worse in others. We are justifiably risk averse when it comes to non-consensually modifying how people think, but we won’t know for 20 years if the losses outweigh the gains. If giving kids ADHD is even possible (and I doubt it is) then it’s a mixed bag because neurodivergent people really do have more of the creativity, insight, and judgment that can’t be outsourced to AI; the ethical issue is that, while neurodivergence is beneficial to the collective, it’s still a hedonic net negative for the person who has it.
All we can say right now is that social media companies are irresponsible, not that they’re necessarily destructive. But institutions have always done things to people’s minds without their consent that have been reckless.
We can look at how Facebook handles its own moral responsibilities and correctly indict it. What’s shakier is the claim that 2020s social media does more psychosocial violence than, say, 1950s communities did. I’m not convinced either side of this argument decisively wins.
I really don't see how high quality displays are the problem.
Squinting real hard to see a silver lining here, but when a settlement is reached, does that mean they can be tried again for the same thing? If the states can't, can individuals try their own class action suit?
Meta stock price is up, so the market thinks paying only $16.7 billion is a win.
As long as you have enough money to throw billion dollar darts at a trillion dollar dart board you're gonna skate out cleanly every time. There's a bigger problem here and everyone knows it.
Honest question. Who got to decide to accept this decision on behalf of state and federal citizens? This seems performative rather than punitive and doesn’t seem to match the harm.
The prosecutors representing the justice departments of states of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey
am I taking crazy pills, or does Productive Pauses seem like a feature to make someone scroll more? Exhibit G from the settlement doc [1]
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/23-05...
A few days ago I learned guerrilla dissent groups here in Colombia were using Facebook and Tiktok to target children towards joining them. $16.68B is too little for them.
Oh no, not dissent! We can't have the children dissenting!
> Meta will impose daily usage limits and restrict nighttime usage by children
Nothing is more addicting than regular intermittent rewards. They are literally not changing anything
As a school administrator, this is pretty disappointing.
I've included slides showing a graphic of someone in a slot machine next to a screenshot of Instagram, and would do an activity where the children themselves drew connections of what they saw/knew. It was not difficult, and they hit it out of the park every time.
The fact that the possible damages sought was over 200 billion, and this settlement clocks in at less than ten percent of that value plus "concessions" that really at this point are just tablestakes for them product itself to just be viable given the parent backlash against these things, is incredibly disappointing. They have cost people on the periphery of this A LOT more, and from a merely business proposition, the wanton disregard for safety in this case proved to be a smart business move. The lawsuit should have had a chilling effect on anyone trying to do anything similar lately, but that will not be the case.
If anything this will embolden others to continue to pursue strategies of “do harm and pay the fine.” It is simply a cost for these sociopaths doing business, and our government has explicitly endorsed that status quo for decades.
It’s ridiculous that so many issues affecting this country over the last two decades can be traced to the inability of Congress to pass laws.
What about damage to done to kids who are not Americans? As in 18B goes to the American state govts.
They have to sue for that damage. This suit is about the damage to Americans because that's what the plaintiffs asked for
who receives (or has received) actual payments ( other than the lawyers)? I think we need some service that is able to break this out
this is what is most interesting to me as well. does any of this actually go towards helping the impacted children and families?
>The settlement resolves claims brought by 29 U.S. states, and will end a federal trial that had been one of the highest-profile tests yet of allegations that social media companies harmed young users.
>Wednesday's settlement also resolves lawsuits by California, Illinois, New Mexico and Washington, D.C., over privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. Those states will receive $459.3 million to resolve those lawsuits.
16.68 Billion over a period of ten years.
that is pocket change for the company. cut some jobs, reduce some snacks, push more ads. done.
My concern about this isn't about the money. Frankly, no amount would actually satisfy everyone, and even an even-more-comically-large number won't materially impact Facebook (sorry, Meta).
My concerns are:
1. This is an agreed settlement w/ only Meta. This no impact on YouTube, TikTok, etc, and regulators can't point at this and say "Well Meta did it, you have to to!". This isn't a law, it's a handshake[0].
2. Will (or can) this be applicable to adults. If the implementation exists, adults should be able to opt in to it as well. Adults are also subject to addiction and social harms.
3. These restrictions feel like they're about 20 seconds away from being sidestepped by the first teenager that discovers they can make multiple instagram accounts and/or use multiple devices.
[0] This sentence sounds like Claude but I promise I wrote this myself.
> pay a maximum $16.68 billion
Why "a maximum". Do can we expect that in practice it will be much less?
Some payment is withheld unless competitors (Youtube, TikTok) take specific actions as well.
Ok, but how the kids will recover from all this harm? Is this money gonna be used correctly for once?
I don't understand. Why is meta paying 70% while Google tiktok etc are paying 15-30%
Are these not the same apps
We really need to elect people who won't settle cases like this and instead go for a verdict.
So the money goes to families with children? Or is it going to fund other harming activities?
That cases should end with prison sentences, not financial settlements.
You think the rich will let that happen?
Ban engagement algorithms already, its been terrible for society
File more suits, then.
$17 billion is nothing. Should have been more like $500 billion.
So Zuckerberg avoids going away to a re-education camp?
"just cost of doing business." - some Meta boardroom.
Meanwhile they burned $80B on building the Metaverse :)
Business as usual. The ownership class will always win. At this point I really doubt we will ever get anything that isn't either small payment relatively or something they can't weasel out of.
Shame on anyone working there in 2026.
“Shares of Meta rose 4.4% in pre-market trading.”
A measure of the market's perception of the threat to Meta from these lawsuits. The uncertainty is over now, so the price goes back up.
I'm interested in the settlement details - yes $16bn ok fine but any behavioral or structural changes? If it's just financial, nothing really changes... (EDIT: I see julianpye found some details in the WSJ, in another comment. There are some feature adjustments.)
> the settlement details
“Meta will initially pay about $12 billion. That sum increases to $17.1 billion if Snap, TikTok and YouTube also settle with the states and agree to financial penalties and product changes.
…
The settlement will effectively force Meta to make major product changes for all U.S. users. The company agreed to interrupt endless scrolling and to impose two-hour daily time limits on Instagram and Facebook. To avoid addictive use and sleep interruptions, the company will limit usage between midnight and 6 a.m. and silence notifications between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m.
Meta will also limit features that psychologists link to negative social comparisons, such as beauty filters and a tallying of the ‘like’ button clicks. It will also strengthen age verification tools and parental controls” [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/technology/meta-settlemen...
Short-lived. Down to flat now.
Anything that doesn't have Zuckerberg and the rest of the top brass in a gulag the rest of their lives doesn't go far enough.
ZUCK, PUBLIC ENEMY #1
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
The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
Now I think they need to hit YouTube, TikTok, and addiction-engineered loot box games. If we're establishing the precedent that addiction-engineering is bad, that's a huge win for our civilization.
Pretty much the entire mobile ecosystem is a hellscape of black hat attacks on the human central nervous system. You can do it via a web browser or a desktop too but when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it.
From the casinos (Natasha Dow Schull and Addiction by Design) to Stanford and BJ Fogg's Persuasive Design Lab fast forward to AI to hyperboost the addiction and that's where we're at.
Not even grown ups have the capacity to resist the brainwashing capacity and the power asymmetry.
> Then they ignored tons and tons of warning signs that this was having a negative effect especially on children and the elderly.
So long as the changes produced (to their belief) increases in advertising revenue, they didn't care. More ad money was all that mattered.
>when you do it on a phone the portability and something about the form factor and touch interface seems to supercharge it
I recall reading something a while back (maybe even by someone at Rovio) that the simple finger motions across the small screen that were then novel to Angry Birds and the other early mobile touch games had some unique effect on the brain that other interfaces don't. The game mechanics are similar to those in Flash/Shockwave games going back to the 90s, but they become a lot more compelling on a small touchscreen compared to a mouse.
All those smart Stanford grads got to make the world a better place by psychologically damaging millions of children.
> It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
Isn't engagement the holy grail of any startup though? What was wrong (from a legal standpoint) about what Meta did here? I hate social media as much as the next guy just curious as to the grounds on which they were brought to justice. I have seen a couple allusions to their deliberately hiding the harmful effects of their products but have yet to see any specifics.
> The smoking gun here is that they actually hired psychologists and experts in creating addictive stuff from e.g. the gambling industry. It clearly shows that their intent was "make this as addictive as possible."
The Games industry, including everyone's favorite Valve, does the same thing btw. And the result is no less disgusting.
Some nations have great laws that deal with lootboxes. I beleive one approach is making odds known, and another is simply placing fines on firms that use loot box mechanics.
[dead]
>[irreparably damaging] children's minds
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
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?!
There was an ad going around for a while on how Instagram was trying to be safer for teens with parent controls, etc.
If I were to guess, he's thinking he can get the good (if there is any good to be found) without the bad still using more controls/technology.
This is the best example of how Meta actually implements addiction forming apps.
The Insta Ads: Teens can set daily watch time limits.
The reality: When the teen exceeds their set daily watch time limit, the notification includes option to skip and continue watching !!!
He's not going to willingly shutdown his company, the same reason a casino will not just suddenly close up shop. The owner would have to have a dramatic shift in worldview to delete the whole thing.
Strawman, no one said anything about shutting down the company.
Even without the government telling them, they shouldn't be damaging children.
The market is telling them they need to make number go up.
Once all the growth and new ideas were consumed, the only ways to make number go up, is to extract more profits.
This means doing everything within the law, and as safely as they can within the grey area, to ensure they hit those numbers.
They had an existential risk when TikTok showed up, and the design idea behind TikTok was even more addictive and less community oriented than Meta.
Do note: I am not giving Meta a pass. Just ensuring the system of incentives that got us here is interrogated and a better way forward is thought of.
Precisely, this is the point. There is systemic misalignment that encourages companies to behave this way.
I know this is not a popular viewpoint around here, but as a socialist, let me ask you this question: have we considered that the market itself might be the problem? That maybe the incentives it creates are toxic for humanity?
As a moderate, I tend to think things even out eventually - though it is usually what appears to be generational shifts in behavior that causes markets to adapt. It's costly (whole generations get f'd physically/mentally/financially), but the next generation (maybe?) pushes for something different idk
I appreciate the perspective and I can see the logic, thank you for explaining your position.
That being said, the timescale of change in that proposed mechanism seems too slow to me given the extreme urgency I see in the climate crisis. Do you see a way out of it without systemic change? Do you not share the same assessment of urgency?
I'd rather not entire generations get the brunt of a entire class of problems (generations prior had significant health consequences). The best thing a society can do it seems is educate ourselves on what is damaging. When social media first came out no one was talking about what's happening now. Hard to see that very early on before it became a significant problem then aligned with corporate incentives.
The lay understanding of markets is wrong.
The zeroth law of economics is that wants are infinite and resources limited. Economics is the study of how subjective wants can be best fulfilled given the constraints of reality.
Meaning that markets are always designed to achieve certain outcomes, and the idea of unregulated markets that work magically is fiction.
This is why you have (had) people like Lina Khan who identified how Amazon could be anticompetitive, even if kept prices low for customers. All markets have to be tuned, policed, kept clean and rules refreshed to achieve the outcomes we want as a society.
We design markets, and have the knowledge to do it well.
Money!
Figure his own mental steelmans are legitimately more complex, though. And more faulty.
Maybe. I had the ... I'm not going to say "pleasure" or "displeasure", because it wasn't a particularly voluntary experience but it was an enlightening one ... of talking with a couple of newly extremely wealthy people, on a pretty deep/vulnerable level, about their worldview. Anecdotal and not that many data points, so grain of salt. These were two pretty different people in different situations.
The impression I came away with is that their rationalizations for continuing to accumulate/keep wealth were created perfunctorily, downstream of being wealthy. Some of their rationalizations were defensible ("I'll start a charitable foundation" or "I'm economically transforming the communities where my businesses operate"), some not. But I got the strong feeling that the rationalizations (even the ones that these people used on themselves, not for others) were developed in response to the baseline prior that they needed to keep/increase their wealth. The rationalizations weren't reflective of values that were present before the wealth, they were just a necessary buffer against cognitive dissonance given that the real core value in play was that they needed to keep their wealth. If they hadn't rationalized it with "I'm a job creator", it would have been something else, and it wouldn't have mattered. The narrative wasn't the point, they just needed something serving that purpose.
I was also surprised at how little deservedness came up. Very few of their rationalizations had to do with pride/entitlement a la "I am smarter/better than others therefore this wealth should go to me". They were more ... utilitarian reasons that they shouldn't stop accumulating money.
Overall, I didn't find either of these people unusually good or bad--they were ordinary for white-collar educated knowledge workers, with ordinary amounts of grit, greed, values, hypocrisy, and adaptive/maladaptive behaviors, to my eyes. They rationalized their having wealth with the same combination of true/false/self-serving/values-based logic that other people use to rationalize ... I dunno, not voting, or not giving money to beggars: the reasons presented are usually foils for the underlying reasons, you know?
I always come back to the born again Christian who acknowledges his wealth came from things he isn’t proud of, yet his entire public persona and social network is predicated on that wealth. He doesn’t give it away and actually live the life he’s pretending to now live. He just found a way to have both. The supposed newfound morality/religiosity was just one more thing to greedily acquire.
They were connecting people.
They had to make positive results.
They had to bow down to the culture wars and the people in government.
They had to X, or the concequences to them would be bad.
I know that many people in trust and safety, civil society, etc. cut their teeth doing safety at Meta. They had many genuinely upstanding people who tried to do the right things for their users. People who pushed the issues to their leadership.
However, you do not get paid by reducing time on site. You are not valuable, when you are from a cost center that is reducing revenue.
I know that T&S conferences have to discuss how to describe the work as revenue accretive, just so that leadership listens before doing something horrifically bad.
Within firms, the incentives mean engineers grow by figuring out how to remove /automate T&S, rather than fulfil requests from T&S teams.
You get what you build incentives for. Even on HN you see this. There are more converastions on the threat of censorship than on actual research or papers and safety.
He may simply believe if you’re not able to identify and keep your kids off of addictive / harmful substances, then you’re getting what you deserve.
It makes the most sense. Especially given the “dumb fucks” quote.
Some popular ones:
* The whole Atlas Shrugged self-deification bit
* Relatedly, the "Effective" "Altruism" bit, where you first have to gain power at all costs to then properly wield it for good. But even by that standard, you'd think he'd have enough power by now.
Lastly, not really his own mental steelman, but more of an external diagnosis:
* Increased wealth has been shown repeatedly [0] to be correlated with narcissistic symptoms. Maybe it's simply pathology.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23963971/
You're being very kind and generous with the benefit of the doubt, like he even needs his own mental steelman.
For most of these ultrawealthy execs, I don't think it's even that moderately complex, and I don't think they really try to rationalize it to themselves. All they know in life is "number must go up" so that's all they really care about. In their positions, they don't have to listen to anyone but shareholders, and all shareholders care about is "number must go up." Some of them have PR people who sit there writing speeches that rationalize what they do in terms of some kind of nebulous good, but when they're done mouthing the words, they go back to their dashboards and all they are really working on is the numbers and making them go up.
Why do you need to be in his head? Something that applies to many powerful billionaires is that they believe their money and power make the superior human beings, entitled to shape the world as they see fit. Without that, they're nothing.
> entitled to shape the world as they see fit.
Isn't that what most people in democracies think though? When you cast your democratic vote on a candidatr, aren't you hoping to dictate how the whole country should be run?
The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual.
> Isn't that what most people in democracies think though?
They do think that, yes. But they're not shaping anything as they see fit, at best they're shaping as millions of other together see fit. They're giving someone a millionth of a mandate to do something, and then hope that happens.
> The only difference between someone like Zuckerberg and your average citizen is that the latter is powerless as an individual
That's quite the difference. It's exactly the only one that matters from what we can see around us every day.
It's the entropy of power. Spread that power over too many people and it becomes noise.
I’d love for someone to get me into Mark Zuckerberg’s head on why he should keep doing what he’s doing.
The guy just bought a castle in Ireland.
He's doing it so he can buy another castle, then continue to tell everyone how in-touch he is with the regular person.
If he doesn’t do it someone else will.
Also, I’m sure Peter Thiel being one of his first major investors has something to do with it.
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 unable to see that.
"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.
Mark Zuckerberg created the world you are lamenting.
Besides, this message came out in a lawsuit Mark lost and was not a public message. He was in a lawsuit because he stole people's ideas.
The guy still has the same heart and mind he did when he wrote this. He proves it every day.
Those messages were posted on some rando site that doesn't seem to exist anymore - Silicon Alley [no typo] Insider. And I think the lawsuit was mostly them just wanting some of the big Facebook cash rather than actually feeling that Zuckerberg stole anything. Facebook, especially early on, was not a particularly unique nor complex to implement idea. He just hit on some good business ideas by making it feel trendy and elite with the whole university only invite only stuff, ideas Google would go on to copy with Gmail.
In any case though I'm not here to argue that Zuckerberg is some amazing person. But the GP up in this thread wanted to know what was going on Zuckerberg's head, and most people are seemingly incapable of understanding how other's perceive the world without resorting to cartoonish child-like caricatures of villainy. I blame a failing education system that demonizes the past rather than teaching to understand how easy it is to find yourself in the shoes of the villain.
And on that note I think most people would probably end up acting similar to Zuckerberg in his shoes right now. By now he probably loathes social media and its users. But he's also probably unable to give it up simply because it makes billions of dollars, and his other ventures are mostly failures. So he's having kids, playing with politics, and generally living life, while milking his golden goose for all its worth.
>They "trust me"
>Dumb fucks.
Is an attitude he never grew out of.
>Is an attitude he never grew out of
Why would he do that? Billions of users prove him right. I wouldn't change my views either if I'm right. It's society's fault for being dumb fucks. This creep it's just exploiting that.
creep
I think the word you're looking for is "sociopath."
It's amazing that we keeping letting sociopaths like him hurt whoever they want instead of locking them up the moment we identify them.
He genuinely believes people like you and your children are on a different tier of existence and importance than he and his family are.
It’s that simple.
The real trick was convincing parents to buy devices for their kids. That's by far the worst thing he's ever done.
I thought texting and / or AOL Instant Messenger was responsible for that!
Definitely not! Texting was so small-scale, and text-only, that it was fine. Big chat groups where people are bullied (or some are not invited), and nasty images are the problems there.
Agreed, especially considering Meta made $60.46 billion in profit in 2025 alone.
This is a settlement between Meta and 48 states. Individuals can still sue them for harm, and one notable case had them pay 4.2 million. There are hundreds of thousands of claims pending. The federal government still has the ability to sue or fine Meta as well.
>one notable case had them pay 4.2mil
Ok so if most individuals that care sue them it will become a.. $17B fine. Doesn't sound that impressive either.
The system rewards psychopaths like Mark. Decent people, like Tom from MySpace, cash their check when they have more than they need. Demons, like Mark, want more and more and more and more- they will go to any lengths to get it because screw everyone else, they are lessers. That’s Mark and that’s the system rewarding him. We all know Tom is way cooler.
America defaults to free. That's very unsettling for those that prefer an authoritarian approach.
Maybe all these state AGs knew there was a good chance of losing because the facts aren't as strong as the narrative?
> "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 your food without telling you? No, that's just actually a brain-dead, immoral position.
The general proposition is that the default for freedom is strongest regarding communication.
"Communication" includes things like fraud that are understood to be inherently harmful to other individuals and also to society at large and for which there are no sane or moral defenses. So, no, there is no default position for "communication" without further qualification.
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.
Why is cocaine in food bad but refined sugar is fine?
Ignoring societal conversations about the relative merits of sugar vs cocaine, you appear to have skipped/missed/ignored/misunderstood some very important words in my comment, and it has caused you to believe that I said something I did not say.
I did not say "putting cocaine in food" is bad.
I said "putting cocaine in your food without telling you" is bad.
We've decided sugar is less harmful. It's also more useful in food than cocaine which would only be there to turn people into addicts. I'm inclined to think that if companies went around adding cocaine to food to make it more addictive the way they do with sugar society would be much worse, so it seems reasonable enough. If there's data somewhere that would suggest cocaine would be less harmful than sugar though I'd be open to taking a look at it and changing my mind.
You've engaged with a straw man and allowed it to gain false legitimacy. Debate on the subjective merits of cocaine vs sugar is a complete derailment in a conversation about whether tricking people is ok.
> America defaults to free
I mean does it?
even if you do freedom as in freedom of speech it seems somewhat diminished.
> there was a good chance of losing
now that is a good question. When a large multi-national corp offers you ~4% of yearly turnover to fuckoff, does that sound like a company confident it would win?
Are we going to pretend that internet did not expose inappropriate content to children prior to Facebook?
There were definitely horrible places on the internet pre Facebook that were popular among kids like Rotten and Ogrish. But there was not a trillion dollar company investing billions of dollars and hundreds of scientists on research to attract and hook kids to their platform. This is not remotely comparable.
Doesn’t Facebook invest a significant part to protect their brand by limiting and censoring content?
Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
They invented the red notification badge. You know, the thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content of people doing better things than you in more exotic places than you. The thing that gets you to compulsively open the app to view content that makes you feel bad about yourself.
>Doesn’t Facebook invest a significant part to protect their brand by limiting and censoring content?
Not really.
>Last I checked Facebook didn’t have Rotten content on it.
Instagram directly connects children with children predators. Surfacing content from one to the other.
The targeted adverts to kids was more horrific. Like targeting troubled male teens with gun adverts.
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 try them, uses well studied addictive mental games to reward the kid. then, with his used car salesman quarter zip sweater and greasy talk, goes, “it was the kids choice. where were the parents?”
surely you recognize the two situations above are not the same.
and just like always, too many people fall for the modern equivalent of greasy sleezeball used car salesmen in a quarter zip who confidently says “it’s not my fault they bought the shit car.”
> 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.
No, there's no need to. It has no bearing on the fact that Facebook facilitates child exploitation.
The case isn't whether or not this happens, it's whether or not the Facebook knew the about the harms and made decisions that were negligent at best or deliberate at worst
That’s not what the comment I’m replying to says.
It was more organic, less profitable and mechanized.
Does that excuse Facebook?
The comment above says that Facebook “raped” children’s minds. When really it failed to protect children from the dangers of the internet.
The dishonesty of not acknowledging the existing problems with the internet, suggests we are trying to scapegoat Facebook.
Discord for example is contributing to this.
there's a difference between allowing exposure to unsafe content, against systematically and deliberately doing everything their psychologist/behavior economists could do to make sure kids were addicted to the product.
It sounds like you’re saying “sophisticated marketing”. Can you distinguish that from marketing that say McDonald’s does towards kids?
Is inappropriate content on some random forum the same as deliberately manipulating children?
"Meta denies wrongdoing in settling claims"
It is like contending with that monstrous child from the Twilight Zone episode "It's a Good Life".
It's good what you did to those children, Mark. And it's a good thing you paid billions in hush money, too.
This is a massive gift to FB. $17B paid is a few weeks of revenue and a single quarter’s worth of profit. But even worse, this is paid out over 10 years! A billion dollars per year to eliminate this major risk is an absolute gift from the AGs. They’re cowards who should be ashamed.
not a recognized psychiatric condition as they employ how many psychiatrists on staff to specifically engineer this addition. i hate that the standard of evidence for these claims is impossibly high. Like you need an email from zuck himself that says "i want to mind rape young boys"... when there's mountains of evidence of them working to that exact goal... they just didnt say "mind rape young boys". The actions and results speak plainly enough. WE dont need zuck himself to confirm it.
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 management response is unsatisfactory, that employees may raise the concern to relevant authority. This will limit management/shareholder/board ability to pressure/incentivize an otherwise individually rational workforce to collectively behave like a psychopath.
Not to sound too cynical but it's extremely hard to imagine that ever passing into law in the places which need it most.
Democracy was also extremely hard to imagine and considered impractical (even in the face of ancient Greek evidence) a few hundred years ago. And then it became the norm.
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!
Laws don’t stop people from doing what they want to do.
It is incredibly naive to believe so
That is precisely what laws do by definition and have done in practice, from the Code of Hammurabi to this day.
Huh amazing. That’s why no one e breaks them then …
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If only the private mercs who act as "security" would realise it.....shame
What's to say they're ignorant?
This is crazy, Meta is not solely responsible for people and kids having addiction to their phones (very similar if not identical to social media addiction).
Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
They profited so thoroughly from building the addiction machine that they sought to lobby for legislation that imposed restrictions on internet usage that will actively and permanently add friction to computing and make the internet as a whole less free, just to try to avoid culpability for their actions. They knew what they were building.
> Gambling has regulations all the companies have to abide by. Social media and content platforms have nothing like that.
Ah, then I’m sure Meta will be quite happy to support legislation that requires a message to be displayed every time you open the app, upload a photo, or post a comment:
Similar to tobacco products.They are a very, very, very significant contributor.
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Who is paying for their internet access?
How is that at all relevant to the comment you're replying to. We don't need to find a single party we can apply all blame to.
I think some blame lies with whoever was paying for Facebook's internet access, and encouraged them to foist more of a predatory approach and cast a wider net than would have been possible otherwise.
There have always been so many people having higher integrity to choose from for those possessing better judgment of character.
Edit: not my downvote btw
Imagine being so out of touch that you think parents are generally equipped with the knowledge, features, and emotional capacity to manage their child's entire exposure to the internet in a way they cannot or will not circumvent. Laughable.
Imagine thinking parents stand a snowballs chance in hell fighting against products explicitly made to exploit their children from companies spending billions on it. It’s like 0.00001% of parents that has those skills, if that.
They don't have to be solely responsible. What they are responsible for are their own actions.
True. They’re just one of the largest companies who deliberately engineered their software to be addictive, the Sacklers of social media, if you will.
Just a ridiculous cash grab
So if I write a book that your kid just can't stop reading it over and over again because I deliberately made it compulsively re-readable, and then your kid develops some kind of issues because my book is so interesting to him, you can sue me and win?
I don't like that idea. Personally, I value free speech more than some supposed "harms" done to children by content. Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
Agreed, this is just setting the stage for requiring age verification (and surveillance) under the pretense of "saving the children".
This is the part all the articles are glossing over. If the settlement terms include age (identity) verification, this is a big loss for everyone's privacy. The plaintiffs will take this template and apply it to other networks like Discord and push to normalize id collection everywhere.
If you can get sued for $16B for not having age verification then it's already required.
I agree, I should be allowed to give children my amazing crystal meth, it's such an untapped market.
There's a law against that. There's currently no law against making a website so fun that kids will waste all their time playing with it if their parents let them.
And how did we create the law against giving children crystal meth in the first place? At a certain point in time, there was no law against it.
How? Certainly not by judicial fiat.
I'm not saying I'm against passing laws on this subject. My point is that no such laws currently exist, but a bunch of lawyers and judges just decided Facebook owes $17B for breaking these non-existent laws anyway.
There's an appreciable difference between creating a compelling work within an established medium like literature and inventing a (digital) machine that exploits psychological vulnerabilities (ie intermittent reward cravings) to keep the target engaged.
> Content that they can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
If staying away from social media is this trivial to you I applaud your self discipline but googling 'social media addiction' suggests a very real phenomenon where people, children and adults alike, often find themselves incapable of self regulating their usage.
It's established that exposing children to bad things causes harm. This isn't specific to technology. "Free speech" isn't a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children.
"Free speech" is definitely a concept that applies to the exposure of harmful speech to children. That's why there's no law on the topic; the Child Online Protection Act was overturned, and organizations like the EFF have been opposing recent attempts (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/house-passed-kids-act-...) to pass a new one.
Yup! I hate meta too but this case wasn’t the right way to take them down. Glad they got away with it.
I don't think this has to do with free speech. If companies can deliberately harm kids, they should be regulated.
This isn't regulation. If it was regulation, Meta could just read the regulation and comply and they'd be in the clear. This is the judicial branch making up and enforcing regulations that don't exist based on their own personal opinions about what causes "harm". No way to know what you need to do to comply until after you're already getting sued.
> personal opinions about what causes "harm " Source that it was their personal opinion?
I've personally read multiple research papers, worked in the field, AND read the transcripts where people at Meta told their leadership that their choices were causing harm. For years.
Sorry, but have you read the details of the case, or am I missing something?
So if a person at your company claims you're "causing harm" in a vague, indirect way that's not explicitly against the law, you're legally obligated to both agree with them and change your whole business model to accommodate that? Apparently yes, but I personally think that's pretty dumb.
And no I haven't read all the details, it's an extremely broad settlement that apparently covers everything from vague allegations of harm caused by social media addiction to Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data obtained through Facebook's API. There are too many claims to investigate all of them individually in detail without making that a full time job, so I'm speaking in broad terms here about how I think our legal system ought to function.
What in ? > Meta shut down internal research into the mental health effects of Facebook after finding causal evidence that its products harmed users’ mental health, according to unredacted filings in a lawsuit by U.S. school districts against Meta and other social media platforms.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
This is researchers and internal teams finding causal evidence of harm from their products. Not just once either.
This case is one of the most significant cases of our time. None of this is based on some random person at work having an opinion.
Separately, How does it not being your full time job, save you from having to back up your opinion or your own thoughts?
I fully recognize you don't have to be an expert on my neck of the woods, so sharing info is natural.
But you are doubling down after I am giving you information. Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
What were they legally required to do after their research uncovered this "causal evidence" in your opinion? Shut down?
Cars get into crashes and kill people everyday, yet I don't think it would be appropriate to sue car manufacturers for this harm, solely under the grounds that they "knew about it and ignored it", even if they conducted a study finding a clear causal link between the existence of cars and roadway deaths.
In general, I think our legal system ought not to punish people or organizations for failing to do things that they have no clear legal mandate to do. This is a general claim that I don't feel I need to know all the details of the case to make, though you're certainly welcome to provide specifics if you think they would change my opinion about this specific situation.
> Do you think that the lawyers for meta, the courts and the plaintiffs would have gotten away with such throw away arguments?
No, because unfortunately our legal system doesn't work the way I'm saying it should. If someone feels you have injured them in some way, they can sue you even if you acted in good faith and broke no laws, and if they can demonstrate harm, even indirect harm, they have a good chance of winning. It makes for a very unstable legal environment.
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Yeah, and all you perverts stop telling Grok to produce kiddie porn, because Elon is a free speech absolutist who absolutely believes in his own free speech, and your own personal responsibility to close his kiddie porn generation app. So if somebody uses it to generate pictures of your children, you can easily stop consuming by just closing the app.
So harming kids has an official price tag now, $17B. That’s about $8 for every kid in the world.
The amount is too small, as usual, and is just a slightly annoying cost of doing business.
It's kind of funny that Facebook tried to launder its brand by renaming itself Meta, and its vile reputation is haunting that brand now too. New name is so abstract is sounds vaguely dystopian.
Not sure that it matters though, because Instagram and WhatsApp are still in everyone's pockets. Even in hippie circles, they're almost mandatory to stay connected.
And even open source software such as OpenClaw encourages people to use WhatsApp and it's hard to escape.
Disgusting. A drop in a bucket, quickly recovered via tax breaks, government spending, etc.
Meta employees should be accountable for this. And stock buyers too.
You could choose to work elsewhere. You could choose to invest in something else.
Many here are shocked when a company does not observe GNU licensing, but are OK working, using or investing in such an evil organization.
LifeLog wins again.
Zuck, PUBLIC ENEMY #1
I find it fascinating how spotty the evidence around "Social Media" causing harm seems to be (as opposed to: harm happening on social media because that is just where kids are now), yet how viscerally so many people seem to agree that it must be the case.
Why is that?
Isn't this just the EU wanting to tax big american businesses?
Here it is states of USA wanting to tax corporation not incorporated in them. So pure greed.
Pay the fine, go back to exploiting humanity.
Its not enough. Shut them down.
Minors should just be banned from social media
So a literal slap on the wrist that doesn’t discourage or stop the actually harmful behavior.
Look, I get that certain demographics are terrified of another Arthur Andersen-esque collapse of a firm, but if we don’t punish companies to the point of possible insolvency, then we’re creating a moral hazard wherein more companies will continue engaging in harmful behavior because they know they won’t ever be held properly accountable.
If we actually harmed (or even bankrupted) Meta with a suitable fine relative to the harms inflicted, you’d see the wider social media industry (and adjacent tech companies) clean up their shit really fucking fast to avoid a similar fate.
What do you do about people who make their livelihoods on these platforms?
Personally idgaf about them - I feel they contribute. But I want to know what you think.
It sucks.
On the one hand, I think destroying Meta and social media in its current form would be a net good; same with fossil fuel companies.
Though you raise an issue (“what about folks whose livelihoods depend on the harm perpetuated”) rather than reject the premise using such reasoning, which is the absolute right attitude to have. It’s easy to sit on my high horse and tut-tut folks reliant on Facebook Marketplace or Gas Station Convenience Store shifts for their livelihoods, but that’s not helping jack shit. Personally, I believe part of the punishment should be leveraging the fines or damages collected to build social support systems for genuine victims - which includes working class folks who had to choose between starving/homelessness or survival. I lack the policy expertise to make specific pitches, but we do need to keep those folks in mind as a means of learning from Arthur Andersen and Enron: punish those creating the harm, while helping those who were casualties of the collapse but not directly complicit themselves.
It’s hard. It’s complex. Some folks will fall through the gaps due to our abysmal social safety nets. That being said, those numbers are infinitely smaller than the folks harmed by social media in its current form, and thus the trade is a net good.
Using this new problem to justify not addressing the current one is the worst move we could make.
The cost to society for smoking cigarettes was more than the benefit of people who worked in those industries.
No industry this large, will be without second and third degree effects.
Imagine still believing that working at a insidious company such as Meta is a "badge of honour" after knowing that they did this for decades.
No, no, no we’ve got this all wrong! Courts are meant to change laws not charge fees.
17B is cheap compared to changing the laws being exploited.
META won this one hands down.
Basically a slap on the wrist.
I remember when I was working at Meta, I was offered a "high impact" opportunity to work on youth products. Nope.
Link is paywalled
Is this a different case from the $1.5 trillion suit against them?
Pathetic and toothless. Zuckerberg and all the scum like him should be getting all of their ill-gotten assets seized and his insides rearranged inside some maximum security prison, not this pathetic bullshit.
Great, now the rest of the world needs to sue them too
Pocket change
lol ad money be good
lol this is pretty pathetic. Chump change. Good job US “justice system”
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I absolutely hate these settlement endings. The states were going to win.
I am so sick of corporations getting slaps no the wrist for these heinous crimes. Why is there no fucking justice in this god damn country?
Table stakes. Just the cost of doing business.
A bit like millionaires who park illegally because "it only cost $100 to park here, and my PA will do the admin"
I mean downvote all you like, but you know there's a team in place already doing their damnedest to define dark UX patterns to enable them to technically meet the restrictions.
I’m beyond sick of how this country operates. This is small potatoes for Meta and stops the $1T+ lawsuit, which would have had an actual impact on these scumbags.
Time and time again it’s the same story: the Protestant worship of money and wealth at the expense of others. If it makes money then it’s a blessing from God, and thus cannot be evil.
Sorry, Americans, but your children will be mind raped with social media and pornography to grow the GDP. Don’t put up a fight: the government has their back. And an army.
You puritans are obsessed with porn. If you don’t like jerking off, then don’t! Hate yourself and leave the rest of us alone. You’re not protecting kids or anyone else with your moral panic.
Yup. Who brought circumcison into this country and why? Oh yeah, mad as hell conservatives who would literally mutilate their children all because gasp they might experience a bit of that forbidden, evil, no good, pleasure.
And after all, we are all sinners in a world of an angry god…
Fuck WASPs.
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Protestant? that's a cute misdirection
This is so cheap to them. Why should they comply with the law when it is so cheap to them not doing so?
$16.6B versus $1.4T market cap (1.17%). So basically rob a bank of $100 million dollars, on your way out give $1.1 million to cops and you are free to go with the rest.
Yes. This has been demonstrated as a viable strategy more times than I can count.
Financial settlements of what should be criminal cases should not be allowed. Hundreds or thousands of people at Meta should instead be jailed.
If we assume that the median income for a Meta employee/board member is 100 kUSD then that 16 GUSD is 160 000 man years. 16 000 people should go to jail for 10 years instead. And that should include everyone at the top.