> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act, which will hold their feet to the fire and force them to protect children and teens.
This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
Reading through the list, I really wouldn't call most of them lies. There are some lies, but it's mostly 'very precisely worded statements' and statements that were arguably made in bad faith, but are not technically false. With some of them I am not even sure how their 'evidence' column is supposed to refute the quoted statement.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
> The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
> > The only way to outlaw Meta’s dangerous and egregious behavior is to pass legislation, like the Kids Online Safety Act
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
Remember when he bought IG and one of the conditions was that he not merge IG / FB but its definitely merged behind the scenes. IG somehow knows your FB and vice versa. Also, when one goes offline, both go offline.
I haven't paid a lot of attention to this issue but after reading some of the statements in the article I can't help but agree with Tech Oversight's conclusions. It's just anecdotal but recently, when mindlessly scrolling reels, (yes, bad enough already) I came across a reel that was unquestionably sexually explicit (in USA, I think policy varies on locale). I reported the account and reel because after clicking on the account there was even more material. This wasn't just a "creator" promoting their adult site with suggestive content. The account had several reels where the preview image was just black but after 2-3 seconds an adult image would appear.
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
Not trying to defend Meta at all here, but this report is also lying.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
I think the heart of the issue is mental health not being tangible enough for a common man, not being able to easily see and identify the plethora of spectrum like how a simple cough and cold flu might look and feel like; is what drives these companies to billion dollar valuations.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
Americans are ok with Trump and ICE and gun-nation and schoolshootings and bombing brown-skinned people in far away countries: nothing is going to happen with Zuckerberg.
Letter writing (with faster delivery), Book printing, Radio, Television, Music Distribution (records and tapes) --
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
48 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 48.2 ms ] thread"Jury told that Meta, Google 'engineered addiction' at landmark US trial" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832 10-feb-2026 385 comments
This is no surprise he lied, that's just what businesses do, their bottom line for the shareholders is all that matters. But the answer is NOT the "Kids Online Safety Act"
Legislation will definitely help things, regulations more so, but that safety act is not the answer ie Age Verification. So rewrite it, do your job, use the researchers and experts available to you to bring a bill proposal that doesn't have special interest groups or lobbyists behind it and then we can see some improvement.
But lying in Congress IS perjury. He should be in jail for contempt, and then then personally tried for perjury. Its a felony with punishment up to 5 years.
I do not agree with Thomas Massie on a lot of things philosophically, but I respect him for pushing for the release of The Epstein Files.
In my opinion being this broad is really hurting the message. They should concentrate on the actual lies, not dilute the list with "In 2024 Zuckerberg told congress that accounts of under-sixteens are private by default, but they only rolled that feature out in 2024, seven years after learning of the harms of not doing that. He lied!"
Lying has become normalized to such an extent that reality is unknowable. Just listen to any regime press conference on any day. Just pick any random day and listen.
The hyperreal is here.
Just last week there was uproar because Discord was going to require age verification to join adult themed servers and bypass content filters. This is how people are getting baited into inviting these restrictions and regulations into their services: By believing it’s necessary to hurt their enemies like Mark Zuckerberg combined with “think of the children”.
It’s still sad to these calls for extensive regulation and oversight getting upvoted so much on Hacker News.
Every time you see someone calling for regulation for kids online, remember that the only way to tell kids and adults apart is to force everyone to go through age verification. Before you start thinking that you don’t care because you don’t use social media, remember that you are reading this on a social media site. The laws aren’t going to care about whether or not you think Hacker News qualifies as social media.
Really?
Even if we ignore all the implication of censorship and surveillance state, lying to the congress is already a crime. It's already regulated. If he can get away with it why another act would be different?
Facebook closed my report with "no further action required" saying the content does not violate their policy. I'm sure they have an absolute tsunami of reports to go through and I do not envy the humans tasked with this work. However, it seems pretty clear to me they are not effectively achieving their publicly stated goals of moderating the content on their platform.
Then he can pay the pardon bribe.
For example, it says "79% of all child sex trafficking in 2020 occurred on Meta’s platforms." But the source it cites actually says 79% of online social media cases occurred on Facebook and Instagram. So this stat is probably just a reflection of Meta's market share of social media.
Until the society changes its outlook towards mental wellness, no amount of regulations or Government oversight might solve this and we'll continue to have the next generation of Meta or TikTok ready to kill humanness in humanity further.
This is a list of items that when new, were going to be the downfall of society. Im sure a few of you are old enough to remember the satanic panic of the 80s and the PMRC in the 90's.
None of these turned out the way people thought. There is nothing new under the sun, and this response looks very much hyperbolic in the face of manipulated data and "feelings" over "facts".
That isn't to say that there aren't things wrong with Facebook, or social media, but this keeps getting attention when it is no where near the top of the list.
*bitch noun 1. - commonly used in reference to the government and the people.