It will never actually be 1.4T in fines if they lose the Supreme Court is in their bag... but it would be a nice win on principle. Here's hoping Meta goes to zero one day; if they did the world would not suffer one iota.
A lot of people's retirement accounts have Meta in their portfolio and they employ around 80k people. Maybe something better we can hope for is a change in management. A new CEO for sure.
Zuckerberg's turned the retirement funds into patsies. They have two options: exit their positions for something else, or hold water for him with regulators and the legal system while having no ability to fundamentally change the company due to the fact that he holds majority voting control.
Disinvestment creates the possibility of a stampede for the exit. If one major institutional shareholder starts to sell off, all of them might start to sell off, and there might not be any good paths out for the later sellers.
If those 80k people are employed to harm the world then it's good that they stop working. Like if we had many people employed in the business of theft rings or spraying CFCs into the air for the entertainment value, it'd obviously be much better for everyone else for them to be unemployed instead.
Likewise it's a little hard to be sympathetic toward the idea that our elders should even be allowed to retire comfortably if they got there by destroying their children's lives.
People are morally complex than that. Lots of people have no idea what they're invested in and many people work for companies like Meta and Amazon because they have no other work options.
All the same, if one generation completely fails to uphold their side of the generational contract, whether through malice or indifference, why would the following ones hold up their side? Their failure to build a world that the next generations can live and raise their own families in means they did not earn their rest. If dismantling things that are actively, today, still harming people as a means to fund those retirements means they can't have that comfort, well okay then. They should've spent their resources building renewable energy generation or something instead. Something no one would want to tear down.
And FAANGs have an entire industry around getting into. They are not and never were the only option. They're notoriously the more difficult option, and during the last 15-20 years when this was all being built, software had some of the best career prospects. No one was forced to work there. They had to go out of their way to do it, and a lot of them specifically practiced for it. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Even if it were their only prospect, just like if a theft ring were someone's "only prospect" (it's also not), the correct answer is still to stop them.
Have some compassion man. Hindsight is 20/20. I'm sure when we're both old, people are gonna call us out for things we should have done that would have prevented the world from becoming X, Y, or Z. At the end of the day most people are just trying their best to provide for their families and for their futures with the best information that's available to them.
It's not hindsight though. The problems with the ad economy were always known. Page and Brin pointed it out in the pagerank paper. It's not that they didn't prevent something: they built it with eyes wide open.
Or like the gambling thing: it was already illegal. All they had to do was not make the world worse. The saga that led to its legalization started with a voter referendum. Then other states jumped on the idea and took it further. No one needs hindsight to realize universities pushing their students to gamble on sports is evil. There's no "that's how it's always been" to excuse themselves; they thought of a new way to exploit young people and did it.
In any case, even if you grant them mere indifference instead of malice, that still earns them indifference toward whatever troubles fixing the damage they're still right now bringing might cause them.
It could be. If we can elect enough progressives. There is appetite for it.
Gen Z grew up fully inside the panopticon, with every interaction measured and optimized for advertisers. I think the ones that wake up and look around are pissed.
Make no mistake, there is a possible future where enough progressives get power to reform the supreme court, and if that ever happens there will be a reckoning.
At a certain point, can a judge just please rule that Meta has lost its right to do business in the United States? It repeatedly ignores rulings and has lost credibility when it claims that it will change its practices. I don't see why they 'need' to exist. Another, more responsible social media platform company would quickly spring up in its place if it were dissolved.
Not before holding Zuck personally responsible economically for all the social disarray, psychological damage, addiction, mental instability, self image issues, spyware delivered over ads, addictiveness-by-design.-
If Zuck is personally responsible for everything, then no one else at Meta is, which mean Zuck will be ruined, but the company will continue doing its nasty things, with someone else at its head.
That's why companies are fined and not just one person.
This is what happens when you let one person control a massively influential company.
Zuckerberg should not be allowed majority voting control. No one should. He shouldn't be on the board that is meant to hold the c-suite accountable to shareholders, either.
Right now Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship that has the legal status of a corporation and a bunch of potential bag holders in the retirement funds who hold the parts that Zuckerberg does not. Since they don't want to have their holdings lose value, they'll carry water for him with regulators and courts, but won't ever be in a position to make him actually change his conduct with how he runs the company.
It should never be illegal, to give fools the opportunity to be parted with their money.
These funds have expensively paid advisers, and should not be investing on a company with a an ISS Governance QualityScore of 10/10. For ISS 10 is the worst while 1 is the best...
> It should never be illegal, to give fools the opportunity to be parted with their money.
The problem is, that money then does other things that aren't good.
The article focuses upon the addictive qualities of Meta's social media applications, but there is at least some evidence that Meta has served advertisements that contain CSAM. I'm not linking the stories here because I'm not searching anything like that on my computer, but that, to me, is a far, far more serious problem than addictive doomscrolling, and far less legally ambiguous. If any of this is true, then Meta's in possession of CSAM, and that's illegal, no ifs, ands, or buts.
> These funds have expensively paid advisers, and should not be investing on a company with a an ISS Governance QualityScore of 10/10. For ISS 10 is the worst while 1 is the best...
The funds' advisors have one job and one job only: make the number get bigger without doing anything overtly illegal. If that means investing in the company that gets people hooked on their product and who may or may not be serving CSAM as a part of their core business, that's what that means. It's not legally actionable to do so, while not doing so, is.
Voluntary ratings systems by index providers aren't stopping this sort of corporate behavior. The only way to deal with the problem is to make things illegal and deal with things through the courts.
To place an advertisement you probably need to identify yourself and use a card or bank account for payment. It would be extremely stupid to use illegal materials in advertising, but if it is true, why the suspect is not caught and instead Meta is sued? Did Meta do anything to make it easier to use such materials in advertisement?
I will concede to you, retail investors need to be protected. So I should have qualified that as professional investor fools, since its clearly what we are talking about here.
Let the retirement funds get fucked, and then sue their advisers for allowing them to be invested in Meta. Then, via the seemingly only thing that actually matters: pressure from Wall Street, maybe then, we will get social media to be responsible.
There is no "let the retirement funds get fucked".
We watched what happened in 2008. If the devaluation of your stock presents an existential threat to the retirement savings of Americans, the US government will put itself deeply in debt to bail you out.
Retirees are the strongest voting bloc in the US. If you tell Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Boomer that their dreams of retiring to a golf community in Florida are in peril, they're not going to look back upon their decision to go with a retirement plan that invested in Meta and say, "we should have known better." They're going to write to the AARP and ask them what the hell their membership buys if not someone to fight for their dream of swinging on and off the course in Boca Raton.
Mental health exam for C-suite once company hits billion dollar valuation, no sociopaths allowed.
-
Also, how greedy am I that when I look at the socially-responsible index funds and see their 10yr returns aren't as good as typical index funds, so I don't move all my money to them.
> Mental health exam for C-suite once company hits billion dollar valuation, no sociopaths allowed.
Can we extend that to include all politicians beyond a certain point as well (say, anything beyond local politics maybe; Wanna move up into State politics or above, get yer brain checked by a headshrink first?) I'd 100% vote for that.
Meta is a terrible company but you're saying it should be illegal for the founder of a company to remain in control of the company as it grows.
Why on earth would anyone start an initiative which could spiral out of their control? If my company did great harm, I'd prefer it to be my fault, not the fault of a board or government that is completely insulated from the effects of their actions.
A narrower argument would be that (at a huge scale), you should not be able to separate the economic interest in a company from control of the company.
The founder can keep control, just don’t sell all of your ownership.
> Meta is a terrible company but you're saying it should be illegal for the founder of a company to remain in control of the company as it grows.
Correct. Well, at least with majority control vested in one single person with no accountability to anyone, which is the exact case with Zuckerberg. It doesn't matter what the board at Meta wants to do with him right now, he's got majority voting control.
> Why on earth would anyone start an initiative which could spiral out of their control?
Well, you see, there used to be this axiom we lived by: great reward comes with great risk. If you wanted to grow your company and possibly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, you would have to accept the conditions placed on you by investors.
We've now tossed that second part of that statement, "great risk", out the window, with a predictable result: you have people doing bad things who are accountable to absolutely no one, at least not in any way that a civilized society would consider acceptable, and they're harming others. Humans go power-mad sometimes.
> If my company did great harm, I'd prefer it to be my fault, not the fault of a board or government that is completely insulated from the effects of their actions.
That might be how you would prefer it, but it's not the way the business world prefers things. The entire point of incorporation as a legal concept is to separate your personal holdings from those of the business in the event that there's a liability placed on the business. Otherwise, people wouldn't start an initiative because, as you put it, it could spiral out of their control.
If they don't incorporate, once a court proceeding dictates that they've injured another party and must liquidate and transfer all of their assets to the injured party, they must do so, desire for control be damned.
Since Zuckerberg is legally separate from Meta, and cannot be held personally liable for wronging others through his role as CEO in most cases, it's not unreasonable to expect him to be accountable to other parties through less-severe means, like losing his job should the board of the investors that he approached find him to be acting against their best interests.
Imagine a world where Meta announced it was legally required to shut down.
Put aside the obliteration of stock value and job loss. What would be lost, and how hard would it be for folks to replace it with something else?
I imagine it would be all the talk for a hot few days. There'd be a hustle and a bustle as folks tried to entice their friends to other services. There'd be a land grab to recreate network effect lock in. There'd be talk even among normies to avoid it.
It'd be glorious, I tell you.
And three weeks later, there'd be a winner that got most of the exodus. A few people standing around looking for a chair in a 21st century version of duck-duck-goose.
A year later, things would be largely the same. Just as abusive. Serfs to different lords. No one would miss Meta.
I think you could make a good case that it you broke meta into Instagram, What's App and FB, and Google into YouTube, Android + Cloud, Search + Advertising (or something like that)... you would have companies that would have competition in digital advertising and companies that wouldn't be so powerful that they could ignore all government regulation.
The bigger issue is the legal bribes, aka donations and gifts, that politicians will take from any company to look the other way or limit legislative change. Current Supreme Court justices have accepted gifts from companies they rule on.
USA judiciary is corrupt at the top. Same with the current majority in the legislative branch, and most defiantly the executive branch.
This is why I support a 4th section of Government in the USA. Binding resolution from the people. People would be able to create and make laws. Binding resolution is why Colorado made cannibals legal. It was the people overruling the politicians. Every State needs binding resolution and it is most warranted at the federal level.
Not that Meta doesn't deserve everything it has coming to it, but the length of time it takes to litigate something like this just takes so many eyes off the ball of all of the current tech that prays on minors, like Roblox.
Our laws in this area are insane : COPPA is very broad. Meta attempted to comply but the state is arguing “willful-blindness” (which makes sense for meta, PII restrictions are very strict). But the lawyers will argue post-hoc that Meta “should have done more” these standards are so vague and argued after the fact that they make a mockery of our system.
Then the state laws being leveraged are crazy broad. California competition law as well as advertising law is being leveraged.
My god, it has to stop.
We’re far past the point of “show me the man, I’ll show you the crime.”
So imma play devil's advocate a bit, cuz I think it's fun, also I dislike bandwagoning.
Meta may not be a great company but I don't think their loss here is all that great either:
>In New Mexico, Meta is being required to improve "age assurance models and tools" using AI, and to attempt "to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model."
None of that sounds really desirable to me. I read that as "death of the anonymous internet", Meta's loss (to the cheers of everyone) is ushering in ubiquitous age verification.
I also see stuff like this:
> [google and youtube were] negligent and failed to warn users of the dangers associated with using their platforms.
and
> Industry experts are calling it social media's "Big Tobacco" moment, with Meta as the centerpiece
While psychological addiction is a thing lets not conflate that with literal physical addiction to a chemical. "warn users of the dangers",really? what do they want; a big banner that says "Warning! youtube might be too entertaining"?
While I don't doubt Meta's done some shady stuff, or at least mildly negligent stuff because it benefits them I think in some respects they have an impossible task. I also thing they've become a scapegoat such that lazy parents and bored adults can eschew any personal responsibility for their actions. "its not my fault I let my kid on Facebook unfettered, or spent all Tuesday doomscrolling, it's these damn companies giving me everything I want!", hell I do it here on HN which barely even has "an algorithm" it's such an easy trap to fall into companies barely need to even try.
> None of that sounds really desirable to me. I read that as "death of the anonymous internet", Meta's loss (to the cheers of everyone) is ushering in ubiquitous age verification.
This is an interesting point, that Meta's unpopularity in this matter could be used as cover to push other unpopular agendas.
47 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 23.1 ms ] threadAnd therein lies the problem.
Zuckerberg's turned the retirement funds into patsies. They have two options: exit their positions for something else, or hold water for him with regulators and the legal system while having no ability to fundamentally change the company due to the fact that he holds majority voting control.
Disinvestment creates the possibility of a stampede for the exit. If one major institutional shareholder starts to sell off, all of them might start to sell off, and there might not be any good paths out for the later sellers.
Likewise it's a little hard to be sympathetic toward the idea that our elders should even be allowed to retire comfortably if they got there by destroying their children's lives.
And FAANGs have an entire industry around getting into. They are not and never were the only option. They're notoriously the more difficult option, and during the last 15-20 years when this was all being built, software had some of the best career prospects. No one was forced to work there. They had to go out of their way to do it, and a lot of them specifically practiced for it. They knew exactly what they were doing.
Even if it were their only prospect, just like if a theft ring were someone's "only prospect" (it's also not), the correct answer is still to stop them.
Or like the gambling thing: it was already illegal. All they had to do was not make the world worse. The saga that led to its legalization started with a voter referendum. Then other states jumped on the idea and took it further. No one needs hindsight to realize universities pushing their students to gamble on sports is evil. There's no "that's how it's always been" to excuse themselves; they thought of a new way to exploit young people and did it.
In any case, even if you grant them mere indifference instead of malice, that still earns them indifference toward whatever troubles fixing the damage they're still right now bringing might cause them.
Gen Z grew up fully inside the panopticon, with every interaction measured and optimized for advertisers. I think the ones that wake up and look around are pissed.
Make no mistake, there is a possible future where enough progressives get power to reform the supreme court, and if that ever happens there will be a reckoning.
That's why companies are fined and not just one person.
Zuckerberg should not be allowed majority voting control. No one should. He shouldn't be on the board that is meant to hold the c-suite accountable to shareholders, either.
Right now Meta is more-or-less a sole proprietorship that has the legal status of a corporation and a bunch of potential bag holders in the retirement funds who hold the parts that Zuckerberg does not. Since they don't want to have their holdings lose value, they'll carry water for him with regulators and courts, but won't ever be in a position to make him actually change his conduct with how he runs the company.
This should be illegal.
These funds have expensively paid advisers, and should not be investing on a company with a an ISS Governance QualityScore of 10/10. For ISS 10 is the worst while 1 is the best...
https://www.iss-stoxx.com/research-advisory/governance-and-f...
The problem is, that money then does other things that aren't good.
The article focuses upon the addictive qualities of Meta's social media applications, but there is at least some evidence that Meta has served advertisements that contain CSAM. I'm not linking the stories here because I'm not searching anything like that on my computer, but that, to me, is a far, far more serious problem than addictive doomscrolling, and far less legally ambiguous. If any of this is true, then Meta's in possession of CSAM, and that's illegal, no ifs, ands, or buts.
> These funds have expensively paid advisers, and should not be investing on a company with a an ISS Governance QualityScore of 10/10. For ISS 10 is the worst while 1 is the best...
The funds' advisors have one job and one job only: make the number get bigger without doing anything overtly illegal. If that means investing in the company that gets people hooked on their product and who may or may not be serving CSAM as a part of their core business, that's what that means. It's not legally actionable to do so, while not doing so, is.
Voluntary ratings systems by index providers aren't stopping this sort of corporate behavior. The only way to deal with the problem is to make things illegal and deal with things through the courts.
"Legalize Ponzi schemes and three-card Monte" is certainly an opinion.
We watched what happened in 2008. If the devaluation of your stock presents an existential threat to the retirement savings of Americans, the US government will put itself deeply in debt to bail you out.
Retirees are the strongest voting bloc in the US. If you tell Mr. and Mrs. John and Jane Boomer that their dreams of retiring to a golf community in Florida are in peril, they're not going to look back upon their decision to go with a retirement plan that invested in Meta and say, "we should have known better." They're going to write to the AARP and ask them what the hell their membership buys if not someone to fight for their dream of swinging on and off the course in Boca Raton.
Mental health exam for C-suite once company hits billion dollar valuation, no sociopaths allowed.
-
Also, how greedy am I that when I look at the socially-responsible index funds and see their 10yr returns aren't as good as typical index funds, so I don't move all my money to them.
Can we extend that to include all politicians beyond a certain point as well (say, anything beyond local politics maybe; Wanna move up into State politics or above, get yer brain checked by a headshrink first?) I'd 100% vote for that.
Why on earth would anyone start an initiative which could spiral out of their control? If my company did great harm, I'd prefer it to be my fault, not the fault of a board or government that is completely insulated from the effects of their actions.
The founder can keep control, just don’t sell all of your ownership.
Correct. Well, at least with majority control vested in one single person with no accountability to anyone, which is the exact case with Zuckerberg. It doesn't matter what the board at Meta wants to do with him right now, he's got majority voting control.
> Why on earth would anyone start an initiative which could spiral out of their control?
Well, you see, there used to be this axiom we lived by: great reward comes with great risk. If you wanted to grow your company and possibly become wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, you would have to accept the conditions placed on you by investors.
We've now tossed that second part of that statement, "great risk", out the window, with a predictable result: you have people doing bad things who are accountable to absolutely no one, at least not in any way that a civilized society would consider acceptable, and they're harming others. Humans go power-mad sometimes.
> If my company did great harm, I'd prefer it to be my fault, not the fault of a board or government that is completely insulated from the effects of their actions.
That might be how you would prefer it, but it's not the way the business world prefers things. The entire point of incorporation as a legal concept is to separate your personal holdings from those of the business in the event that there's a liability placed on the business. Otherwise, people wouldn't start an initiative because, as you put it, it could spiral out of their control.
If they don't incorporate, once a court proceeding dictates that they've injured another party and must liquidate and transfer all of their assets to the injured party, they must do so, desire for control be damned.
Since Zuckerberg is legally separate from Meta, and cannot be held personally liable for wronging others through his role as CEO in most cases, it's not unreasonable to expect him to be accountable to other parties through less-severe means, like losing his job should the board of the investors that he approached find him to be acting against their best interests.
Put aside the obliteration of stock value and job loss. What would be lost, and how hard would it be for folks to replace it with something else?
I imagine it would be all the talk for a hot few days. There'd be a hustle and a bustle as folks tried to entice their friends to other services. There'd be a land grab to recreate network effect lock in. There'd be talk even among normies to avoid it.
It'd be glorious, I tell you.
And three weeks later, there'd be a winner that got most of the exodus. A few people standing around looking for a chair in a 21st century version of duck-duck-goose.
A year later, things would be largely the same. Just as abusive. Serfs to different lords. No one would miss Meta.
USA judiciary is corrupt at the top. Same with the current majority in the legislative branch, and most defiantly the executive branch.
This is why I support a 4th section of Government in the USA. Binding resolution from the people. People would be able to create and make laws. Binding resolution is why Colorado made cannibals legal. It was the people overruling the politicians. Every State needs binding resolution and it is most warranted at the federal level.
Our laws in this area are insane : COPPA is very broad. Meta attempted to comply but the state is arguing “willful-blindness” (which makes sense for meta, PII restrictions are very strict). But the lawyers will argue post-hoc that Meta “should have done more” these standards are so vague and argued after the fact that they make a mockery of our system.
Then the state laws being leveraged are crazy broad. California competition law as well as advertising law is being leveraged.
My god, it has to stop.
We’re far past the point of “show me the man, I’ll show you the crime.”
Meta may not be a great company but I don't think their loss here is all that great either:
>In New Mexico, Meta is being required to improve "age assurance models and tools" using AI, and to attempt "to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model."
None of that sounds really desirable to me. I read that as "death of the anonymous internet", Meta's loss (to the cheers of everyone) is ushering in ubiquitous age verification.
I also see stuff like this:
> [google and youtube were] negligent and failed to warn users of the dangers associated with using their platforms.
and
> Industry experts are calling it social media's "Big Tobacco" moment, with Meta as the centerpiece
While psychological addiction is a thing lets not conflate that with literal physical addiction to a chemical. "warn users of the dangers",really? what do they want; a big banner that says "Warning! youtube might be too entertaining"?
While I don't doubt Meta's done some shady stuff, or at least mildly negligent stuff because it benefits them I think in some respects they have an impossible task. I also thing they've become a scapegoat such that lazy parents and bored adults can eschew any personal responsibility for their actions. "its not my fault I let my kid on Facebook unfettered, or spent all Tuesday doomscrolling, it's these damn companies giving me everything I want!", hell I do it here on HN which barely even has "an algorithm" it's such an easy trap to fall into companies barely need to even try.
This is an interesting point, that Meta's unpopularity in this matter could be used as cover to push other unpopular agendas.