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> according to a lawyer who is prosecuting the world’s largest social media company.
The headline makes it sound like something internal at Meta got revealed. The catchy four-H phrase is the clever hook the lawyer came up with to try to hold the jury’s mind through the case.
If you’re unfamiliar with how these trials work, the lawyers are trying to create a compelling narrative to support their case and catchy phrases that sound like marketing lingo are often used. This wasn’t some internal Meta doc that got revealed.
The trend I have noticed is anytime the actual truth leaks from these actors and companies, it's so much more evil than I could have imagined. Like the recent tell-all book from someone who worked directly with Zuckerberg, Careless People -- I was shocked at just how amoral those in leadership there. I had a dim view of them before, but their actual words and deeds were worse than I could have imagined.
The DOJ's clever hook won them the case.
Or, rather, the fact that Microsoft was blatantly illegally abusing their monopoly position to kill competitors.
If this ends in another fine to put into a ledger book I'll scream. The fine ends up back in their pockets in months in the form of loans and grants and tax avoidances and so on.
The world no longer needs Facebook and its leaders. It does not need its technology. It does not need the ideas of the people that are there. If you are still working there, you are complicit in acting in a company that is actively seeking to control a populous.
I understand it's hard not to work for "big tech" and not work for a company trying to control populous.
So yes. I agree. Stop letting them play games with the rules we spent generations putting in place to protect our citizenship.
1. Perpetual existence means breaking the law is a short term problem that is well worth the long term benefit — companies essentially live for ever and out live many of the consequences of their actions
2. They can’t be physically jailed and are rarely punished with equivalent restrictions. There is no ankle bracelet for bad companies. So the punishments are inadequate to serve as a deterrent,
3. Fines are rarely of a scale that threatens existence so they become just another cost of business that can be financially modeled
4. The decision makers almost never suffer the consequences of their companies actions. It’s so rare at this point for executives to face personal responsibility in terms of fines, or jail time that there is a absolute incentive to ignore laws in pursuit of short term earnings
5. There is a two tier system, large companies can abuse the legal process by outspending prosecution from the government or harmed parties. Law suits drag on so long that it’s essential a get out of jail free card for companies that are large enough.
6. It’s pretty clear the government wants Facebook to spy on and persuade the population of the world. So this behavior is a “national defense” asset and any harm is justified as being necessary for the preservation of that asset.
I could go on but until most of these are fixed, expect Facebook in particular to evade any meaningful punishment.
Also the board and anyone who's ever held more than 1% of the stock.
You may need this: https://eathealthy365.com/learn-to-scream-like-a-pro-the-def...
Meta owns WhatsApp, which is core infrastructure in many countries now where it has basically replaced the PSTN. If WhatsApp went down without a long transition process first, it would take myriad small businesses down with it. I would love to see harsh punishments and jailed executives, but the world still needs the company for the time being.
Get your pillow ready, because this is the only thing that'll happen if the verdict goes against them. Of course, the verdict could go the other way so no fine is levied at all. Maybe get a second pillow just in case
+1.
More importantly and less often talked about, these fines end up back in their pockets because Meta is a defense contractor in all but name. Governments gladly buy data from these companies; the US hapily buys data because it circumvents the 4th amendment. The reason the US does not have strong data privacy laws is because strong data privacy laws are antithetical to big tech, technofascism, and a surveilance state. Yes, the people running these companies are doing evil unto the world for profit, and arguably yes, they ought to face justice for such, and yes, what they are doing ought to be illegal because it is morally wrong and incredibly damaging. But when that justice is monopolized by the same governments that rely on these evil acts to fulfil their desire for power and self preservation, nothing will happen. Meta has been complicit in multiple genocides, yet you will never see it on any lists that harm its business.
I thought they were pushing for on-device age verification, which from a "mass surveillance" perspective is pretty bad? If you wanted mass surveillance, you'd want mandatory ID verification by sites and/or government SSO, both of which allows you to capture a persistent identifier. Of course, meta isn't doing all this lobbying out of altruism. Doing on-device verification means they're off the hook for it, and google/apple has the shoulder the burden instead.
I'm so tired of the whatabouts and the normalization and the pretending like this billion trillion whatever company has does anything but take advantage of its power to defend itself with slants and lies that any normal person or small group could never get away with.
You can be a big company and not be pointedly or maliciously harmful to society. Facebook is not that. And no, I will never refer to it as "meta" to allow yet another opportunity for these people to sane wash their behavior.
We know who they are. We know what they choose and chose to do. Let the tattered and broken laws of the world actually do something.
"What normal businesses do"... sheesh.
If you're doing what every one else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted, that's reeks of political motivated prosecution.
Not necessarily. Even government resources are finite.
If you are doing what everyone else is doing, but only you are being prosecuted (currently), it could be (and often is) because the people doing the prosecuting have limited resources, and the best practical course of action for them is to go after one highly visible target and get a ruling that will spook everyone else into self-correcting (or be the next largest target).
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar
Not quite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49400754
1. Get new customers 2. Retain them as customers 3. Track what the customers do 4. Keep internal operations confidential
Honestly I dislike them but they are the closest store to me.
Arguably, that's even more harmful.
Harming kids creates harmed kids. Harming elders helps install terrible governments which harm everyone - including kids.
The kids will be ok. The revolution won’t be started by boomer dads.
Expensive Image Consultant: "It's vital we present a friendly, innocuous brand throughout what promises to be a long--"
Zuck: "We still got that scary fucker who looks like he just defends mobsters on retainer?"
Lackey: "We do, boss."
Zuck: "Think we're done here."
exeunt by taking off glasses
why oh why are giving them the benefit of the doubt? There was in fact a twirled moustache executive.
> Internal chats within the company stated, “Oh good, we’re going after <13 year olds now? Zuck has been talking about that for a while…targeting 11 year olds feels like tobacco companies a couple decades ago (and today). Like we’re seriously saying ‘we have to hook them young’ here.”
> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
This might seem like the most damning quote, but if you read it again it's pretty clear it's someone who's objecting. In other words, not a twirly mustached executive saying "we're going after <13 year olds" as an actual objective, or "we have to hook them young".
>> Even after determining internally that teen safety was a massive problem on its platforms, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, “teen time spent be our top goal of 2017.”
>> One internal email from September 2018 indicates that, according to Meta, “The lifetime value of a 13 [year old] teen is roughly $270 per teen.”
So... exactly what I said earlier about "Shareholders wants growing revenues and users"?
Similarly, I get irritated when people frequently almost continuously attribute actions and results to ‘the President’ or such state heads.
I generally agree with you, however this makes an assumption about what "correctly" means. In this case, Meta could be working correctly and take it's orders directly from the Zuck commander's intent. In which case he would be a single person that would have a massive impact on the outcome. Therefore, should be appropriately accountable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ma#During_tech_crackdown
(Yes, Clarence Thomas has been bribed. That's what the RV and the trips are.)
They don't go to prison for environmental or social harm.
Those evil states!
No person with 'morals' would join this company in 2026, unless with the next RSU cliff, the morality hormone immediately gets triggered when the bank account reaches 7 figures.
It's mind control. That phrase is often associated with woo woo conspiracy theory, but I don't think that's hyperbolic. If you are engineering addiction, what you're doing is attempting to run a black hat security attack against the human central nervous system to violate a person's will and autonomy. That is the definition of mind control. Properly framed I think it's a form of assault, especially when deployed with deliberate concealment of motive or against children, the elderly, the mentally ill, anyone not strong enough to resist it.
The medium doesn't matter: addictive drugs, slot machines, web sites, social media apps, games. In that list I actually think explicitly labeled gambling stuff like Las Vegas is the least evil since at least in that case it's kind of up front and overt about what it is. I mean, it's a casino. WTF do you think a casino does? Hard drugs are kind of the same at this point. The thing that makes this case so awful is that people genuinely didn't know. Nobody including myself understood just how effective addiction engineering in a digital medium could be, and these companies were secretive about just how hard-core they were getting about studying and engineering this. They hired psychologists. There's stories of studies putting people in FMRI machines. It was a deliberate R&D program with the (secretive) stated goal of addiction.
The next thing important to understand is that businesses are structurally incapable of self-policing something with a profit incentive. I didn't say unwilling. I said incapable. Businesses, like all "corporate" entities (non-profits, governments, etc.) operate with a certain set of constraints, social customs, and rules, and for a business one of those is that they must earn revenue and/or attract investment to survive. If addiction results in revenue, then any business that refuses to engineer addiction will fail.
This is also why regulation of things like child labor, forced labor, safety requirements, etc. are required. If a safe workplace reduces profits than any company implementing a safe workplace loses to those who do not, etc.
BTW this is something a lot of "online Marxist" type anti-capitalists don't understand when they vilify business leaders. A business that doesn't do the profitable thing stops being a business. It's outcompeted by those who do the thing. The only way to stop these things is to universally police them, which levels the playing field and allows businesses who don't do the bad thing to keep operating. It's an instant race to the bottom because a business cannot not race.
So yeah... lots of words but I think this is an important issue and it's good that it's happening. I really hope an example gets made here, or that this at least raises awareness.
I think it's critically important that we start dealing with digital addiction engineering as an issue before the AI funding bubble pops. When that happens all the AI companies will have to look for other sources of revenue. Addiction engineering online became a thing after the dot.com bubble popped for exactly that reason. We already have AI driven addictionware in the form of digital partner apps and such, but if the AI investment gold rush stalls and we have a mass push for revenue among AI companies then with no policing here this will get really really bad.
A final moral to the story, I think, is that science f'ing works.
Like I said, it shocked me to see how much addiction a web site or a mobile app could create. Learning that it was deliberately engineered makes it less surprising.
Science works. When you apply the scientific method to an engineering goal, progress gets made, often dramatic progress. If the laws of physics and the nature of the system you're studying will allow it, you can get so far that the result can be shocking. Look at the hydrogen bomb. Look at aviation, space flight, AI, modern medicine. There's good and bad in there of course cause people do both good and bad things.
Which is why saying "we are going to apply science to make our product more addictive" should be criminal conspiracy. "We are going to apply science to do X" where X is some form of assault should be criminal. "We didn't think it would work that well" is a poor defense because I think at this point we should have learned that science works.
Murder is a tidy kind of evil. If you murder someone that's bad and you go to jail, and murder is pretty decisive. The victim is no longer alive. The black and white nature kills all the nuance around "why did you do it?" It doesn't matter why you killed them. You killed them so you committed murder.
This, however, has shades of grey, and that sucks. If I write a novel and try to make it entertaining and make it a page turner by making chapters punchy and short, is that "engineering addiction?" What if I design a game and try to make it fun and end up making it addictive?
You end up with stuff like the famous and infamous statement about porn: "I can't define it but I know it when I see it." That sucks because to police something you need definitions and lines.
Moral problems like this suck because they require deeply nuanced thinking and a continuous social discourse around where to draw the line, and we hate that. People like absolutes. So one problem you tend to get with moral problems like this is bifurcation of the discourse into moralist crusaders with a zero-tolerance policy versus libertines who think it's not a problem. Both of these extremes lead to abuse and immoral actions. The crusaders end up being worse tyrants than the problem, while the libertines leave the sheep to be devoured by wolves.
But that's what this is. It's a complicated grey problem that mandates a continuous ongoing social discourse and a never-ending series of court cases. But it exists, so we have to deal with it, so we have to do that.
It means we have to think. Ugh.
To answer your question directly: yeah, I think a big part of the ad industry falls here, and that's good. What remains is ads that are informative, playful, or entertaining, and those are the kids of ads we don't tend to hate so much. Some of them can even be legitimate art.
The best way to start with problems like this is: start by drawing a line just to the right of the stuff that is unambiguously terrible.
If you create a scientific R&D program to study the human brain and human psychology with the express purpose of engineering addiction and then fail to communicate this fact to the people you're trying to addict, that's IMO pretty damn unambiguously evil. When the government did this it was called MKULTRA and there were congressional hearings over it and people shredded documents and hid under rocks in fear of what they were doing coming to light, which kind of shows that the people doing it knew it was bad. So let's start by banning that kind of shit even if it's happening in the private sector with private money.
Then once you've drawn that line, re-assess. If the problem is still terrible and pervasive, consider drawing another line a little further to the right. Repeat.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. There should be one central catalog of products and services and all commercial information should be available to "pull" and never get "pushed". To be able to sell any product or service you should be legally required to register it in the catalog with detailed description (including manuals, also technical manuals) and up to date price.
Enough that I'm not gonna read their shit ever again if they stick with THAT.
The only two options are "accept all" and "reject all and subscribe".
This was supposed to be a form of consumer empowerment, not a literal extortion mechanism.
How am I supposed to take their stance seriously? They rag on people who do shit like this