You don’t like it when they release research, you don’t like it when research leaks, you don’t like it when research is suppressed. Hard for Meta to do anything right on this topic.
> At her home in western Germany, a woman told a team of visiting researchers from Meta that she did not allow her sons to interact with strangers on the social media giant’s virtual reality headsets. Then her teenage son interjected, according to two of the researchers: He frequently encountered strangers, and adults had sexually propositioned his little brother, who was younger than 10, numerous times.
It seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
I am desperately waiting for someone to come along and disrupt social media. It's overdue. My Facebook feed is entirely low-effort slop and posts from acquaintances I added 15 years ago. Instagram and Snapchat aren't too different. Miserable experiences with infinite content, no quality, and no connections.
What kind of disruption are you expecting? It can only get replaced with something similar, not something better.
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
Meta continues to prove that they have a company culture of trying to ignore their responsibilities to users.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
> Meta did not directly dispute or confirm the events in Germany described by the researchers, but said such a deletion would have been meant to ensure compliance with a U.S. federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data and with the General Data Protection Regulation, a landmark European privacy law that broadly prohibits companies from collecting personal information from anyone without consent.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
You're asserting that Meta a set of responsibilities towards their users, beyond simply providing a service that users can choose to use or not use.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
Meta employees have raised serious issues about the company downplaying or even suppressing research on child safety risks, especially in virtual reality spaces.
They said that the company suppressed research on child safety risks, especially in VR. Meta denies it, but it’s a serious concern
The same company complicit in the genocide in Myanmar? The same company found to be stealing data about women's menstruation cycles? The same company that wants to hoover up your photos as training data?
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
Going to prison would not be enough, he'd be pardoned very quickly and there'd be very little of a discouraging effect on other megacorps with similar ethics.
I hate that Meta and Google - companies that are among the leaders in AI and invest billions in cutting-edge machine learning R&D - pretend they are unable to detect that children are accessing their platforms in violation of age restrictions (13 years in most cases).
I grew up on star trek TNG. However at a certain point in the past I was having kind of a hard time rewatching episodes. "We have the Internet and social media now, and they're obviously not going anywhere so why doesnt star trek have either? It is simply scifi of the past and now we need new scifi to incorporate new technological and social advancements."
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
A lot of Star Trek writing wildly errs with computers. And other things, but also computers.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
A side note, but there've been a couple of times in the most recent season of (the largely excellent) Strange New Worlds where I've thought "they're talking to the computer like an LLM now". The holodeck episode springs to mind, but I'm sure it's happened a few times.
I mean grok has an AI girlfriend that will undress for you. It's specifically instructed to be extremely jealous and to pretend to be madly in love with the user. Apparently no meaningful age restrictions of any kind. All this data of perhaps kids chatting explicitly with their AI partners land on company servers.
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
Social media is the 21st century’s tobacco company. The companies selling it know it’s terrible for people’s health, but they keep doing it because $$$.
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
In other words there will be no/positive economic and social downsides for those engaged in, "world levels" of unethical conduct.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 65.5 ms ] threadIt seems to me possible solutions could be a mix of:
a) company monitors all conversations (privacy tradeoff)
b) validates age
c) product not available to kids
d) product available to kids, leave up to parents to monitor
Think of tabaco. Nothing comes along and gets people to quit addiction to this shit. The only stuff that might naturally have this effect is usually worse.
Folks addicted to social media won’t quit for something healthy. Those who do, do so with great effort, much like those who quit tabaco.
For me it’s stuff like this.
This is a repeating pattern of someone raising the alarm to them, teams realizing it’s a possible concern and the company reacting by telling them to avoid looking into it lest it bite them later. And it always comes back when something horrific happens and it is always shown they knew and did nothing.
A truly innovative and responsible company would investigate and rejoice in trying to find solutions. But the top down culture from Mark is one to get all power at all costs.
"Concerns on privacy", ironic and laughable.
Meta is a just a PR company brainwashing its users.
Are these responsibilities enumerated or written anywhere? Honest question, because it's quite hard for a large group of people to agree on what these responsibilities might be unless they are written down including reasonable tests of whether they are being met or not.
That's it. It hasn't let me down yet in my many long years of life.
Surely not! Surely they would never do something unethical!
Society is breaking down in part because of it.
America would be a nicer place if Mark Zuckerberg went to prison.
These days though. Yeah, it's kind of obvious that you can't have a space faring civilization with the Internet and social media weighing you down. Honestly the Eugenics wars probably get kick started by social media.
Like, IRL we can't fire modern artillery over the horizon without a computer assisting us, and that's only a few hundred miles; a starship within range of their transporters (up to three times the diameter of this planet) is just an invisible dot on an invisible dot if you're looking for it out of a window. (IRL you can see the ISS flybys because it's only a few hundred km up, last I heard nobody can see any of the geostationary satellites).
Or comms: Uhura was written in an era when telephone switchboard were still around, manually connecting your phone calls by plugging and unplugging cords. (Did any later shows even have a comms officer?)
Even later, VOY tries to show how fancy the ship is with "bio-neural gel packs", but even when that show was written, silicon transistors were already faster (by response time) than biological synapses by the same degree to which going for a walk is faster than continental drift.
My favorite part: just-in-time ad delivery to your suicidal teen for products they might need
Facebook will not try to show your suicidal teen stuff that could help them. Facebook will only show your suicidal teen things that keep your suicidal teen doomscrolling.
Facebook WILL put a small textbox of "Here's the suicide hotline" and then overshadow it with a huge ad for "You aren't pretty enough, buy this body deodorant" that autoplays and includes sound and can take over part of your screen.
Facebook WILL show your suicidal teen stuff that makes them really angry. They do this on purpose. They do this knowingly. That's what "optimizing for engagement" means
If one wants to work in that industry is a personal ethical one, but 20 years from now we’ll probably look at folks working at these companies like we’d look at someone who worked as a tobacco executive. Made good money but maybe not leaving a legacy of an ethical career.
This is the world that software developers create. Any society which rewards less laborious work for significantly greater pay will eventually find reasons to reward, "profits over people." Whether they're Neokantian or free-market liberal justifications it doesn't matter. Thankfully you people have to put up with Forever Trump which almost makes the thing bearable.
-Silicon Valley before the 80's
- Enabled genocide in Myanmar https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- Literally pirated books to train their trash AI LLM: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...
- Violated human rights for Palestinians (even in 2021: https://theintercept.com/2022/09/21/facebook-censorship-pale...)
- Interfered in British politics with the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, one of the costliest and stupidest mistakes in UK's history (full of stupid and costly mistakes): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
- The CEO of the company is famous for ass-kissing even dumber people than himself e.g: Trump https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
What else do you expect from the trashiest company in the world. Of course they don't care for child safety.