this site has some popup that hijacks the page and tries to trick you into installing an antivirus with fake infection reports. Closing that popup sends you to walmart.com
What traditional media doesn't attempt to keep its users engaged? The local broadcast news makes you watch for half an hour to an hour, with a quarter of the time being ads, plus more sponsored segments, constantly teasing the headline news subject, which could have been a 100-word article. They take half a page of printed news and draw it out as long as they can, trying to bait you the whole time. YouTube channels' clickbait titles and thumbnails have nothing on them.
In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on
the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016,
Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram)
taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.”
Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of
208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact,
Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including:
• Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72
• Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894
• By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even
though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the
amount of time they spend on our app.”
One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.”
As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.”
In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering
negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms
taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”
fun fact: lots of smart META teams knew it too and they went it with because ethics can be bought. Stock perf. and TOC bought them along the way so they can exit/retire.
Corporations are evil but teams that work there are even more evil than them. Because they are also part of the decision makers, not just CEO.
We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.
Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives.
Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.
> but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis.
I don't think it would cause that much damage. If I understand right about floats and stuff, Meta is 2.13% of the S&P500, so NVIDIA (8%) could sneeze and cause more fallout to pension plans and so on than deleting Meta entirely. A sudden worldwide loss of access to content on Meta's servers would cause more secondary fallout than what happens to the markets.
I'd settle for corporate jail time. No more profiting off illegal activity when the fine is less than profit. Nope, corporate jail. All operations have to stop for your sentence. No sales, no product development, no operations. Maybe an outside team of accountants can be allowed to run your books. This would effectively be a death sentence for many companies, but at least it mirrors the experience humans have to endure - loss of job, family loss of income, loss of ability to get future employment, etc.
Currently there is no downside for sociopathic behavior. Employment contracts guarantee they earn if the stock does well. If not they get a golden parachute on the way out.
If those that ran the company were actually responsible for what the company does, then this shit would not happen.
> Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare
No. That's a bail-out for Meta. Just assess massive fines. That sidesteps the legal novelty of a "corporate death penalty," together with the fact that just revoking a charter doesn't actually do anything for assets. (Corporate death penalties done right are fines with extra steps. There are many more ways to do it wrong, e.g. thinking revoking a corporate charter means anything.)
The only people who should be arguing for a corporate death penalty right now are Meta's lawyers to distract from the possibility of the real penalty: massive fines.
I see this case pretty simply. The states want to prove that Meta knew what it was doing to kids and did it anyways to raise engagement. Meanwhile it looks like Meta is trying to sidestep that argument entirely by stating that social media addiction is not a formally recognized diagnosis, essentially saying that while it was slimey, it was not illegal.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
> Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making
You can't ignore their argument it but it doesn't hold water imo
They knew they were causing harm, whether that harm is labelled "social media addiction" as a medically recognized term or something else is immaterial
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them.
Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase.
I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram.
Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.
I firmly believe that we could solve a whole bunch of these problems by making it illegal to advertise to and target minors in online advertising on social media platforms. Remove the incentive and you'll get a lot better behavior.
The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated).
You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.
Would they have done that to the Winklevosses' ConnectU? Was ConnectU purely a 'dating site'? As far as I know it was them who onboarded it using college connections
These types of lawsuits seem dangerous. But Meta is a pretty awful company and deserves some sort of comeuppance. I worry about what it leads to though. Hard cases make bad laws.
Any reference to it used to get downvoted. HN commenters would argue he has since changed, that he's older and wiser
But I also recall reading about a conversation he had with a classmate who started a similar database of student information at Harvard. Like the Winklevoss twins, he thought Zuckerberg was copying his idea. I believe he went on to create a website of searchable case law. Was his name Greenspan, I can't remember
Anyway, the gist of what I remember is that in a conversation with Greenspan, Zuckerberg specifically cited federal court as the place where his dishonesty would hit a wall, or something like that
Many years and billions of dollars later, it seems like this may be coming true
I hope they lose and it bankrupts them. I'd like to see Zuckerberg thrown in prison. However, I would like to know what happens that $1.4T? Like, do the states that sued just add it to a slush fund? How would it be used to help mitigate the damage they have done?
We look back on the (at the time influential) claim that rock/metal/etc "corrupts the youth" as a quaint moral panic. Modern views about social media are our version of that same silly claim. Future people will look back on all these comments comparing Facebook to crack with the same amused bewilderment as we look back on the PMRC.
Indeed it would be silly to prosecute the record execs because they found a report called "what are the youths listening to" or even with the video game moral panic of the 90s, going after game companies because they found a report titled "Is Laura Croft setting unrealistic beauty standards for teens" at gamedev companies
This comparison surprises me. There's a difference between content people like organically and content engineered by an army of psychologists to exploit our primal responses.
It's like comparing a baker whose apple pie people genuinely liked and bought, to a company that laced their pie with cocaine to create physical dependency, then bribed stores to stock only theirs for a while.
AfD MEP Mary Khan, on the other hand, complained that a law that had already been rejected was being revived through the back door using salami-tactics until the desired outcome was achieved. No one wants to weaken child protection, but that should not justify putting all citizens under general suspicion and legitimizing mass surveillance.
Pretty reasonable stance compared to Social Democrats:
Nevertheless, the Social Democratic group caved in beforehand and signaled its approval for the urgency procedure, which ensured the necessary majority.
It is sad but inevitable in a free market. The line between a good and an addictive product is often blur. OK, cocaine is addictive and a nice restaurant meal is good but everything else lies inbetween. In the end, I believe after 3-5 year Meta will pay 1.4 billions instead of trillions and 'business as usual'.
46 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 78.5 ms ] threadIts like smoking. At some point were going to look back and wonder why we let kids do that.
Its more insidious than smoking though because it has arguably positive benefits.
Why shouldn’t the Meta precedent also apply to them afterwards?
"Meta knew what it was doing"
In December 2015, CEO Zuckerberg listed as one of Meta’s goals for 2016: “Time spent [on the Platorms] increase by 12%” over the following three years. And as of November 2016, Meta’s “overall goal remain[ed] total teen time spent … with some specific efforts (Instagram) taking on tighter focused goals like U.S. teen total time spent.”
Between October 2022 and April 2023, Meta’s own internal metrics show that an average of 208,000 Mississippi young adults used Instagram daily and 345,000 used it monthly. In fact, Meta monitored key metrics for Mississippi, including:
• Ratio of teen daily active users to monthly active users: 0.72
• Increase in monthly active users over a two-month period: 7,894
• By 2020, Meta estimated 100% of MS teens were monthly active users of Instagram
A 97-page internal presentation, “Teen Fundamentals,” in May 2020, described its goal as to “look … to biological factors that are relatively consistent across adolescent development and gain valuable unchanging insights to inform product strategy….”
That presentation conceded, “due to the immature brain they have a much harder time stopping even though they want to – our own product foundation research has shown teens are unhappy with the amount of time they spend on our app.”
One internal communication noted that Meta could “[l]everage teens’ higher tolerance for notifications to push retention and engagement,” while another noted that some users are “overloaded because they are inherently more susceptible to notification dependency.”
As it noted in its 2019 internal presentation, “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive,” “Young people are acutely aware that Instagram can be bad for their mental health, yet are compelled to spend time on the app for fear of missing out on cultural and social trends.”
In another internal presentation, Meta employees express concerns about “content on IG triggering negative emotions among tweens and impacting their mental well-being (and) our ranking algorithms taking into negative spirals & feedback loops that are hard to exit from.”
Corporations are evil but teams that work there are even more evil than them. Because they are also part of the decision makers, not just CEO.
I wasn’t aware that they were so deliberately targeting (attacking?) teens.
I absolutely don’t think there’s any chance in hell that Meta incurs a $1.4 trillion judgement or settlement.
The tobacco settlement in 1998 was $206 billion, or $423 million after inflation adjustment.
We've all heard the vocabulary: engagement maximization, a/b testing, emotional targeting, ad auctions, user surveillance, sentiment analysis. Children are not emotionally or intellectually prepared to repel this hostile takeover of their minds.
Civilization needs to rein in all these terrible things corporations do to humans.
Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.
I don't think it would cause that much damage. If I understand right about floats and stuff, Meta is 2.13% of the S&P500, so NVIDIA (8%) could sneeze and cause more fallout to pension plans and so on than deleting Meta entirely. A sudden worldwide loss of access to content on Meta's servers would cause more secondary fallout than what happens to the markets.
But if forcibly dis-incorporating Meta did cause such market fallout, there's always this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837
Currently there is no downside for sociopathic behavior. Employment contracts guarantee they earn if the stock does well. If not they get a golden parachute on the way out.
If those that ran the company were actually responsible for what the company does, then this shit would not happen.
No. That's a bail-out for Meta. Just assess massive fines. That sidesteps the legal novelty of a "corporate death penalty," together with the fact that just revoking a charter doesn't actually do anything for assets. (Corporate death penalties done right are fines with extra steps. There are many more ways to do it wrong, e.g. thinking revoking a corporate charter means anything.)
The only people who should be arguing for a corporate death penalty right now are Meta's lawyers to distract from the possibility of the real penalty: massive fines.
The company will settle for a slap on the wrist, a paltry fine that is but a fraction of the profit that was made as a result of the infraction.
The company will not admit to any wrongdoing as a result of the settlement.
The company will continue their behavior but in a stealthier, more obfuscated fashion.
Morally I side more with the states but legally you can't ignore the argument that Meta is making. I feel like if social media addiction does become a formal diagnosis in the future then Meta is screwed unless they drastically modify their product. But I also feel like the best time for that to have happened was in the 2010's when all this stuff started to ramp up, if it didn't happen then it's not going to happen now.
You can't ignore their argument it but it doesn't hold water imo
They knew they were causing harm, whether that harm is labelled "social media addiction" as a medically recognized term or something else is immaterial
Most people don’t buy VSTs( music production software plugins ). I spend at least 50$ a month on them.
Sunday I spent an hour browsing instagram waiting for an ad to appear again. It wasn’t in my ad history for some reason. I found it and made a purchase.
I think these types of sites can work, if users can strictly op into what they see. For the most part my instagram feed is just music and I’ve found out about at least 4 concerts from instagram.
Just this year, 3/4 were artists I was already a fan of and the last 1 I found on instagram.
The beauty of this is you can do this without age verification. How? These companies already derive demographics from behavioral and contextual information but also, preventing targeting is as simple as not giving an option in audience targeting for minors. We already do this, for example, with using race in housing ads, which is illegal (and yes, this was violated).
You need to identify and limit things that become a proxy for age and companies need to be punished for this. But the fact that social media companies would be suppressing advertising to minors anyway will really devalue this kind of workaround.
Would they have done that to the Winklevosses' ConnectU? Was ConnectU purely a 'dating site'? As far as I know it was them who onboarded it using college connections
The "Dumb fucks" story is rather well-known
Any reference to it used to get downvoted. HN commenters would argue he has since changed, that he's older and wiser
But I also recall reading about a conversation he had with a classmate who started a similar database of student information at Harvard. Like the Winklevoss twins, he thought Zuckerberg was copying his idea. I believe he went on to create a website of searchable case law. Was his name Greenspan, I can't remember
Anyway, the gist of what I remember is that in a conversation with Greenspan, Zuckerberg specifically cited federal court as the place where his dishonesty would hit a wall, or something like that
Many years and billions of dollars later, it seems like this may be coming true
Instead of blocking under 16 year old from social media we should fix it. Via courts if needed.
Also the CEOs should go to jail if convicted.
It's like comparing a baker whose apple pie people genuinely liked and bought, to a company that laced their pie with cocaine to create physical dependency, then bribed stores to stock only theirs for a while.