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Discussion (37 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It let them off the hook for a small fraction of the cost they would have incurred should the jury have come back with a verdict assigning liability to Meta, and Zuckerberg didn't have to take the stand.
In the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez, "Wa-hoo, the system fails again!"
Parents need to tell their kids to put the phone down.
Instead they abnegate this duty, and lawyers treat Facebook like a money piñata.
Doritos make people fat, so why shouldn't we sue Frito Lay for billions?
Cars allow you to drive fast and crash, let's sue carmakers.
And so on...
Our justice system is just one big scam. It finds a big, rich corporation, greedy plaintiffs looking for a lottery ticket, and a "jury of peers" in friendly jurisdiction.
Facebook sucks but if your child is addicted to their phone take the phone away.
The litigation lottery our legal system has devolved into is a total joke. This is a nightmare for second and third order effects.
Before you become a parent, you think it's easy. You think you can just decide things for the kid, and that's the way it goes. Especially if you're a high flier, everything just seems like it works out if you put in a little effort.
The thing that's really frustrating is that this is also a lottery. Some kids will actually simply do the thing that you want, and generally choose things that are good for them. Like my first kid. If I only had one I would think it was simple, and that everyone can just raise a kid who can read books for adults before they're ten, or do calculus before tenth grade, or cook a full meal for himself. I mean, you just tell them what you think they should do, right?
But you can also have a kid that will not do what you want. You will get all the same well-meaning advice about making it fun for them, explaining your choices to them, and providing incentives. These advisors are at a loss when you do all the things they said, and yet the kid still won't eat their vegetables. They don't want to read, they don't want to try the sports you take them to, and they are having constant tantrums.
While you think you are simply doing what you did the first time around.
As the kids get older, it also becomes clear that you are not their only parent. And I don't mean your better half. They get an awful lot of impressions from the rest of society, which you are not in control of. If everyone has a phone, you then need to decide whether you want to just go with the flow, or your kid is going to be the one without. If their friends are on social media, you then have to decide what you think about that.
Parents have the busiest schedule of anyone in our society. If we're going to hold them responsible for their choices, the least we can do is provide them with some sensible defaults.
That does not happen all at one on the 18th birthday. It’s many years of gradually growing independence.
While parents have some control, they don't have as much control as you think. It is a constant, "but my friends can do this", and you have to deal with it all the time.
Parents now have to work 2 jobs, so the kid spends most of their time outside of home.
Also, comparing FB to cars, doritos is not fair imo, FB is closer to crack. It can also be accessed on other devices than phones, WHICH they need for school. Not every parent knows how to block it, and kids find ways around road blocks anyway.
I don't have children, but I was a child and I know parents.
It's not a given that a child has this type of 2 way negotiation/bargaining power in the home, let alone the freedom to speak their mind towards their parents.
If your kid is addicted to crack cocaine, they have a problem that is light-years further down the road to existential harm than a similar problem with Doritos or social media.
I can't really disagree with that, but I still wonder why it's okay to use the same addictive methods on adults. To me it doesn't matter if it's children or adults, not if you know this will harm people and you still do it.
It's extremely weird you're allowed to actively built in addictive properties to your product, in an attempt to make users stay. If it was a side effect which happens get a certain (low) percentage addicted that's one thing, but to actively seek out the properties is another. Again, especially when you know that it causes psychological damage and destabilizes communities. How the hell Zuckerberg, Meta management and shareholders sleep at night is beyond me.
Well, for Zuck, it's because he likely has a severe personality disorder.
For management, it's money.
For shareholders, it's the combination of money and the fact that they can't really hold Zuckerberg accountable. He has a majority of voting shares for the company, so there's nothing any of them can really do other than sell. The problem is, if someone with any large amount of shares sells, then there's a chance that there's a panic, and they get in a position where they can't sell all of the shares and the ones they kept have dropped in value.
And really, who in their right mind would buy Meta? Do you want to be a patsy for Zuckerberg? Because unless they issue enough shares to bring his voting power under 50%, you're just along for the ride.
Meta is getting sued because they knew that their product caused harm to users, could detect which users were harmed, and chose to do nothing. It's a little bit like selling food to a customer that you know will give them food poisoning. It's very different from selling someone something that's slightly less healthy than their other options.
Ofc not all of these cases are so clear cut. There are big systemic problems with our food system and our mobility system that you seem to be aware of - but also if you notice Frito Lay is not getting sued by the justice department. Neither are car manufacturers writ large. There's actually a lot of writing and reflection on where the line is between "reasonable service" and "exploiting consumers".
That doesn't mean we can't also hold tobacco companies accountable, but it's wild to me to suggest that parents don't bear the bulk of the responsibility here.
VC people are here, and it shows. They can't just be neutral, they have to downvote anything they disagree with or goes against their businesses
For all the ethical problems I have with Meta I am still on Facebook because my extended family is there and other people I interact with, like the musicians who I photograph at events, are there. Student groups are on Insta, etc.
(2) There is so much bad about Facebook. I see scam ads every day, particularly ads that reproduce UI elements from Facebook suggesting that you have notifications and then send you to some bizzaro world that is certainly some kind of fraud. I report these ads and get a nice note back about how they took action on them and two days later... the same ads appear. These idiots got it in writing [1] that they'd rather not filter the 10% of ads that are scam ads so they can make money ' https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortu...
(3) I'm not a Christian, in fact I am something very different, but I'm tempted to say that Meta and other social media border on the satanic in terms of social influence. In particular I'd point to the way they draw a rift between men and women, for instance there are the endless thirst traps on Instagram and the come-ons for OnlyFans performers that never stop and on YouTube some of the easiest rabbit holes to get into are "Men suck", "Women suck", "Trans people suck", "Cis people suck", ... It makes some people rich at the expense of us all.
(4) It sounds like a lot of money by ordinary standards, but it is nowhere near enough to change their behavior.
[1] ... my conspirators in relatively innocent transgressions know better!
That would be one thing except for Facebook's tendency to ban you, for any reason, while the horrific thing (like that, for example) you report is never taken down ever
I actually do agree that there need to be draconian regulations on social media apps for children but those laws don't exist, it's a failure of congress to not create them, but no you can't start pursuing criminal charges for laws that don't exist, that is how countries collapse.
The proverbial example is a landowner has a pool on their property. A child, maybe just one in the neighborhood, sees it and wants to go swimming, so they hop in. The child isn't a good enough swimmer to do so unassisted and drowns. The parents file a lawsuit. The landowner expects their insurance provider to help aid in the defense and any judgment made against them.
The insurance provider will then look at the pool. Was it surrounded by a fence? Did the fence have a locked gate? Was there any kind of alarm to indicate that someone was in the pool?
If the answer to any of those questions is "no" (particularly to the fence and gate parts) then the insurer might very well decline to cover the claim.
Why? Because it's not unreasonable, at least not to many people who sit on juries, to expect someone to have ways of keeping children out of pools due to the threat of drowning.
I'm not a lawyer, but you can sort of make that argument with the cars Hyundai was manufacturing. People on a jury might think it's not unreasonable to expect auto manufacturers to make their vehicles more difficult to steal, especially if doing so is common across the industry. It's the most expensive thing most people own and its theft can harm both the owner of the vehicle and the community they live in since stolen vehicles are often used in other crimes.
The person stealing the car is still liable, but if they're targeting your vehicles because you didn't want to put a relatively inexpensive part in the car to boost your profits on each vehicle sold, some people think you're liable too.
"By failing to include industry-standard anti-theft technology in their vehicles, Hyundai and Kia unleashed a wave of auto thefts that cost Minnesotans their cars, their hard-earned money, and sometimes even their lives," Ellison wrote in a statement on Tuesday. "In short, they put their profits ahead of people’s safety."
As part of the settlement, Hyundai and Kia pledged to equip all future vehicles sold in the U.S. with industry-standard, engine immobilizer anti-theft technology, which prevents thieves from starting a vehicle’s engine without its “smart” key.
So, 1. Grand theft auto was already and still is a crime. 2. The car companies were being cheap and not adhering to industry-standard feature for basic anti-theft.
You should be thanking Keith Ellison for enforcing regulations that keep humans safe.
|https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/kia-and-hyundai-ag...
The real impact might not have been that big, I mean you get a few dollars a year discount from your car insurance for having an immobilizer, but people basically forgot that car theft was a problem and backed away from solutions in the 2010s, like I'd hear all these stories about telematic tricks to get cars started by making a fake key fob, relaying the signal from a key fob in your house, etc.
[1] I found out later that if you had "The Club" on your steering wheel that was advertised on The Rush Limbaugh Show somebody could use it as a lever to break your locking steering column!
Meta reaches $17B settlement over social media harms to children
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49448819