Luckily we have rule of law here so if you say someone in particular needs to go to prison there needs to be a law that you have proven to break. Just because you dont like someone you can't just lock them up.
We have rule of law here? have you seen the non-independent DOJ today? The Supreme court's rubber stamp and bribed justices? Trump's blatant illegalities?
(Yes, Clarence Thomas has been bribed. That's what the RV and the trips are.)
It's funny isn't it, what the word China triggers in people. They'll say that the US is going down the gutter, but then the very next sentence if China is mentioned, it's all "we have rule of law, we're a just, democratic, lawful country, unlike them". There's still far too much pride.
You're in the lead for funniest comment of the year award!
How's Ghislaine Maxwell doing nowadays? Last I heard, living a very comfy VIP "prison" life. How are her mates? Right, running free. Now let's look at how people jailed for marijuana possession are doing.
Everyone commits crimes, yet prosecution is hilariously selective. Everyone knows this. White collar crimes have a prosecution rate of <1%. Three felonies per day.
There is absolutely no meaningful rule of law in the US. The absurd degree of selective prosecution is antithetical to this.
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.
I don’t think any company has “morals”. For sure individuals might but a big advantage of the corporate structure is this diffusion of decision making and blame. Anthropomorphizing corporations isn’t helping us get a clearer picture of how they work or why they do what they do.
I'm sure everyone here understands that. But, there's a difference between a company that puts morality and ethics first vs. one that abandons it altogether or even encourages its opposition. I've worked for all three types, and after unwittingly working for scum, I recommend to always check who one's bosses are. In my understanding, I believe Zuckerburg has always operated in opposition to morality.
A company is made up out of people. Some are made up out of people with morals (yes, these exist). Those companies have morals. Some, like Meta, consist of people with no morals. Those companies have no morals.
I hate when people say things like “Google did this” or “Meta did that.” There are actual named humans making these decisions. I want them found and held accountable. As of late these people have more power than ever. A single contributor at a company like Meta can make a change that impacts 0.025% of users (potentially hundreds of thousands of people) with zero notice or oversight, for their own individual gain. Not even to mention the systemic decisions this article describes.
On one hand I totally see your point. It's just disgusting that someone on high position is fully aware that Facebook is about making people addicted to slop and serve them exploitative ads. On the other hand, it is an organizational failure, because in a correctly working organization a single person wouldn't be able to throw shit with such a blast radius.
> because in a correctly working organization a single person wouldn't be able to throw shit with such a blast radius.
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.
As someone else noted "Hook, hold, harvest and hide" is the framing from the plaintiffs. There likely wasn't some twirly mustached executive giving a presentation with those words on the slide deck. Instead the "decisions" made are far more banal. Shareholders wants growing revenues and users, executives tell their subordinates to implement those objectives, and it eventually hits the ICs where they're tweaking the color of the buttons to be maximally engaging.
> There likely wasn't some twirly mustached executive giving a presentation with those words on the slide deck.
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.”
>> 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.”
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"?
You misread that first quote in your defense of Meta. The twirly mustached exec is Zuck himself who wants to target 11 year olds. By having a person object to him, he's no longer evil???
>The twirly mustached exec is Zuck himself who wants to target 11 year olds. By having a person object to him, he's no longer evil???
That itself is hearsay, from someone who's apparently opposed to whatever Meta is doing. Taking that to mean Zuckerberg literally said "we should target 11 year olds" is a stretch.
The actual named humans making these decisions are very frequently not people who you would consider accountable. If Meta announced that they're firing hundreds of engineers and PMs for optimizing addiction-correlated metrics, even if there was a clear memo instructing them not to do that, nobody would be satisfied and everyone would see it as a deflection of responsibility by the executives. I know this because it's exactly what happened with the Wells Fargo fake account scandal.
I agree with that, the other side of that coin is executives creating incentive structures that encourage contributors to do risky things, while using the ambiguity to make it seem like nobody is really responsible.
Though I kind of doubt the Wells Fargo executives would’ve considered fake accounts a valid way to grow revenue. It seems Meta is happy to turn the blind eye, because addictive mechanics do in fact grow their revenue
My point isn’t that Zuck’s not responsible, but rather the system he’s created is fucked and a bandaid is to name all of those responsible
How would hurting elderly be more harmful than hurting children? I know that we are about to live in gerontocracy, but it’s still a wild statement to make.
Sure there is, they are conspiring to break a variety of federal laws and continue to do so. I continue to get ads to join WhatsApp “investor groups” supposedly endorsed by Warren Buffet. I got one the other day that is run by Charlie Munger, who apparently rose from the dead to promote pump and dump schemes.
It’s inconceivable that Facebook doesn’t spot that sort of thing. They took a similar eyes off approach to the illegal foreign entity election manipulation.
I don't know that I would agree it's _worse_ than what FB does to children. But there's clearly a parallel, in that a vulnerable segment of society is prey to a careless corporation and the heinous ecosystem of scamers and abusers they foster.
How are the elderly, who have full rights as citizens/members of society, and are (as far as the law is concerned) free and accountable for their own actions, more harmed than minors, who are none of that?
> are (as far as the law is concerned) free and accountable for their own actions
I don't think you've ever had a relative with e.g. Alzheimer's or dementia.
There's a fine line where the above stops being the case. "Vulnerable to predatory behaviour" happens a long time before "can't find the bathroom without a nurse."
The elderly are grown adults who have a lifetime of experience and can be expected to see through the charade and spot what's really going on. Young people are more naive. I'm almost legally a senior citizen and I saw Facebook for what it was a long time ago, and most of the people I know who are my age don't use it, they don't even like social media in general. They use email or text messages, mostly. The people who have asked me why I don't have Insta are all in their 20s.
Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
I disagree. They did not grow up with technology in the same way we did. This is all still quite new to them, and I truly believe the ragebait strategy and polarisation is just as damaging as the tricks used to ensnare teenagers.
> Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
If there were a clean way to define it, I'd probably be better to change:
- "elderly" to "individuals impacted by mental decline, dementia, or other disability;" and
- "children" to "people who haven't reached an adequate level of maturity to [long definition]."
The point is MOST elderly are impacted by mental decline or dementia by some age. That's often not the same as age-of-retirement. I know people where it happened at 60, and where it happened in their nineties.
You'll be a senior citizen soon enough, and maybe a decade later this will hit you too. What mechanisms would you like in place to be protected?
Serious questions: If and when it is, there may be a long period where you'll be:
a) Functional (e.g. able to feed yourself, keep yourself clean, manage the house) and not needing care (e.g. nursing home);
b) Emotionally important to your relatives; and yet
c) Already vulnerable to predatory behaviour
What protective measures would you like to see in place?
Footnote: In my current location, most people 80 and beyond are glued to some source of polarizing disinformation, be that Facebook or cable TV. Coincidentally, of the few I know better personally, some have empty bank accounts, since they can't manage their money properly any more. But they can cook, clean, shop, but not more complex things like that.
$META has everything it needs: the best distribution channels on the internet, a massive user base, GPU infrastructure, and an amazing, talented young team. I think $META will succeed.
In my opinion at least, any attempt to intentionally engineer addiction is morally wrong and should be at the very least civilly if not criminally actionable (if it can be proven).
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.
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 ...
By your definition, almost any ad is mind control and should be forbidden. At least any effective ad. And I don't disagree at that conclusion. There's a difference between telling people you have a product and making people want to have your product
I kept saying "policing" here because unfortunately this is the absolute worst kind of evil for a society to have to deal with: the kind that is not absolutely black and white.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
Sounds like the lawyer's spinning what any successful business does with trying to acquire customers and serve their needs as though they were dealing drugs (granted, the line can be blurry between things that are simply enjoyable versus that which is more strongly addictive - some people get "addicted" to eating, but we can't really ban food, for example)
Perhaps, then, it's a matter of degree like most things. And perhaps, again, "what most businesses do" is not really a good defense to hide behind?
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.
> 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).
Yeah, that doesn't fly with most Americans. Sounds a lot like the Sacklers - welp, can't ban pain meds, so might as well just addict as many as we can to opiods and take as much money as we can before they die
I wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerburg and Sackler were 4th or 5th cousins, they act so similar
It’s easy to have a successful business by breaking the law. It’s easy to with races when you take performance enhancing drugs.
And ask yourself, would facebook be significantly less successful if they didn’t intentionally market to teen girls based on their emotional state and had the decency to ignore signs of depression and anxiety instead of monetizing them? They might be more successful over time.
This HHHH strategy phrase is made up by these lawyers. It's not like the Microsoft version their mimicking where Microsoft actually said it. It makes the headline misleading like it alleges they said it internally as their strategy.
"McGeady testified that Maritz told Intel that Microsoft’s strategy was
to “embrace, extend, extinguish.” McGeady, 11/9/98pm, at 53:17 -
54:8; McGeady, 11/10/98 am, at 21:22 - 23:19; GX 564."
I hope people can see Meta is funding the other side in order to get Child Safety laws passed so they can have an out when children use their parent's device and Meta spies on them. Child Safety laws are just mass surveillance in disguise which has always been Meta's game plan since day one.
> 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. This wasn’t some internal Meta doc that got revealed.
Its the same way "embrace, extend, and extinguish" was coined. "Embrace and extend", without extinguish/exterminate, was used in Microsoft corp docs that were handed to the DOJ during the famous antitrust case, but it was the DOJ that turned it into EEE after realizing what "embrace and extend" actually meant in the broader context of Microsoft's machinations.
Blatant complex behavior, no matter how illegal, won’t convince a judge or jury without clear rhetoric. So catch phrases are essential elements to conveying the truth about the behavior
How about the whole discipline of rhetoric that has thousands of years of history. Or the fact that law schools specifically teach jury communication strategies that focus on the psychology of persuasion.
So I need to give a citation that the US uses dollars as its legal currency, cars generally have 4 wheels but not always, gravity causes things to fall on earth?
I can see how the title is misleading, but I would have been shocked if it was internal Meta jargon. Execs at all the big tech companies nowadays have a culture of avoiding slogans that could be deemed overly aggressive.
Even “Move fast and break things” was technocratted into “Move fast with stable infrastructure” after Meta went public.
The antidote to that would be for Meta to reveal all their internal communications. But they'll never do that because their own words and actions are likely far more damning than any story the DOJ could weave.
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 fun part is their internal communication might be relatively exculpatory, but a good prosecutor can find the crumb or two to hang them.
To the first part of that sentence: maybe, but I highly doubt it and these would be the last people on earth to give the benefit of the doubt to. Zuckerberg, and his peers, are operating in an "us vs them" mentality and we should also prosecute them in the exact same manner. They don't care about their users and they don't view them as humans or equals in any regard. They are parasites who only consume, cast blame, have zero interest in what's fair and treat everything around them as a capitalistic game of who can hoard the most. I would love to see Zuckerberg have to defend himself in a court of law and, instead of dodge every question, have to answer to his worldly peers in a truthful manner. The hatred towards a person like that must weigh on him. The best part about him is Facebook was an initiative in his own failings amongst his personal life. And it never filled that void. Zuckerberg is probably still socially broke on the inside. He's a terrible human through and through.
Indeed. Especially since we know that they know that they reserve the worst of it for face to face conversation and nothing gets recorded and it's all for the sake of maintaining plausible deniability. When asked about their private conversations they can and do lie.
> I mean, it's not like we could just demand to see the code that's governing our lives. What right do we have to poke around in Facebook's private affairs like that?
So far it seems to be the least-worst option. I wish there was a way to enable a citizen to vote their choice but do so in at least a reasonably informed way.
The greatest strength of democracy is an ironclad guarantee that even people holding ideas opposed to current leaders', if there are enough likeminded people, can win power.
That's what lets democracies change, even radically, through elections rather than revolutions.
Unfortunately... the universal and equal suffrage that's a cornerstone of that also precludes any sorting by authority of vote value.
Otherwise you inevitably end up with authority putting its thumb on the scales, similar to Iranian democracy (by design).
A key part of trials like this is the discovery process, which would surface a lot of the documents and emails that supposedly contain this information you’re talking about.
If the lawyers found it, they’d be using it. I think the takeaway from this is that they decided their own catchphrase was more compelling than any language they found in those documents.
I know about discovery. I have a hard time believing that Meta is being perfectly transparent or comprehensive in what they disclose to the prosecution.
If you are into the book, I would highly recommend commentary from people who were also at the firm at the same time and currently working on the field.
Quite. PEople complain about AI language being weird and unnatural, but imho it's just the distillation of this cultural habit of trying to turn everything into a brand, slogan, or mnemonic. When you have a society that generally dislies reading, everything becomes a pitch.
> The jury’s role is advisory, which means they will give recommendations to the presiding judge, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who will make the final decision on the verdict and damages.
What kind of trial is that, and what provision is there for it in the law? Who gets to choose that? The trial is in US federal court in Oakland [0].
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[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 72.4 ms ] thread(Yes, Clarence Thomas has been bribed. That's what the RV and the trips are.)
You're in the lead for funniest comment of the year award!
How's Ghislaine Maxwell doing nowadays? Last I heard, living a very comfy VIP "prison" life. How are her mates? Right, running free. Now let's look at how people jailed for marijuana possession are doing.
Everyone commits crimes, yet prosecution is hilariously selective. Everyone knows this. White collar crimes have a prosecution rate of <1%. Three felonies per day.
There is absolutely no meaningful rule of law in the US. The absurd degree of selective prosecution is antithetical to this.
They don't go to prison for environmental or social harm.
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.
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.
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.”
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"?
That itself is hearsay, from someone who's apparently opposed to whatever Meta is doing. Taking that to mean Zuckerberg literally said "we should target 11 year olds" is a stretch.
Though I kind of doubt the Wells Fargo executives would’ve considered fake accounts a valid way to grow revenue. It seems Meta is happy to turn the blind eye, because addictive mechanics do in fact grow their revenue
My point isn’t that Zuck’s not responsible, but rather the system he’s created is fucked and a bandaid is to name all of those responsible
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.
It’s inconceivable that Facebook doesn’t spot that sort of thing. They took a similar eyes off approach to the illegal foreign entity election manipulation.
I don't know that I would agree it's _worse_ than what FB does to children. But there's clearly a parallel, in that a vulnerable segment of society is prey to a careless corporation and the heinous ecosystem of scamers and abusers they foster.
I don't think you've ever had a relative with e.g. Alzheimer's or dementia.
There's a fine line where the above stops being the case. "Vulnerable to predatory behaviour" happens a long time before "can't find the bathroom without a nurse."
Yes, some elderly are disabled by mental decline or dementia, that's no different from a mental disability at any age.
If there were a clean way to define it, I'd probably be better to change:
- "elderly" to "individuals impacted by mental decline, dementia, or other disability;" and
- "children" to "people who haven't reached an adequate level of maturity to [long definition]."
The point is MOST elderly are impacted by mental decline or dementia by some age. That's often not the same as age-of-retirement. I know people where it happened at 60, and where it happened in their nineties.
You'll be a senior citizen soon enough, and maybe a decade later this will hit you too. What mechanisms would you like in place to be protected?
Serious questions: If and when it is, there may be a long period where you'll be:
a) Functional (e.g. able to feed yourself, keep yourself clean, manage the house) and not needing care (e.g. nursing home);
b) Emotionally important to your relatives; and yet
c) Already vulnerable to predatory behaviour
What protective measures would you like to see in place?
Footnote: In my current location, most people 80 and beyond are glued to some source of polarizing disinformation, be that Facebook or cable TV. Coincidentally, of the few I know better personally, some have empty bank accounts, since they can't manage their money properly any more. But they can cook, clean, shop, but not more complex things like that.
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.
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 ...
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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
And ask yourself, would facebook be significantly less successful if they didn’t intentionally market to teen girls based on their emotional state and had the decency to ignore signs of depression and anxiety instead of monetizing them? They might be more successful over time.
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.
Not quite
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49400754
Was this testimony false?
Those evil states!
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
> 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. This wasn’t some internal Meta doc that got revealed.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
Lawyers and bureaucrats are organizational cancer.
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.
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find something in them to hang him." — Cardinal Richelieu (Armand Jean du Plessis)
To the first part of that sentence: maybe, but I highly doubt it and these would be the last people on earth to give the benefit of the doubt to. Zuckerberg, and his peers, are operating in an "us vs them" mentality and we should also prosecute them in the exact same manner. They don't care about their users and they don't view them as humans or equals in any regard. They are parasites who only consume, cast blame, have zero interest in what's fair and treat everything around them as a capitalistic game of who can hoard the most. I would love to see Zuckerberg have to defend himself in a court of law and, instead of dodge every question, have to answer to his worldly peers in a truthful manner. The hatred towards a person like that must weigh on him. The best part about him is Facebook was an initiative in his own failings amongst his personal life. And it never filled that void. Zuckerberg is probably still socially broke on the inside. He's a terrible human through and through.
-xkcd 1390
That's what lets democracies change, even radically, through elections rather than revolutions.
Unfortunately... the universal and equal suffrage that's a cornerstone of that also precludes any sorting by authority of vote value.
Otherwise you inevitably end up with authority putting its thumb on the scales, similar to Iranian democracy (by design).
If the lawyers found it, they’d be using it. I think the takeaway from this is that they decided their own catchphrase was more compelling than any language they found in those documents.
See Google's infamous 'Do we have deletion turned on for this chat?' executive records.
Companies aren't dumb, and the easiest way to prevent discovery is to have a policy that ensures prompt document destruction.
Luckily, humans (especially powerful ones) are terrible at adhering to often inconvenient opsec, hence the bits that do dribble out.
But it's worth not forgetting those are just bits...
https://anchorchange.substack.com/p/careless-people-is-carel...
There is, of course, more to a story than a headline
The quote is from an opening statemment not a presentation of evidence
Perhaps something was "revealed" in discovery and this will be "revealed" to the court in the upcoming weeks
s/got/is going to be/
The trial will last 5-7 weeks
https://web.archive.org/web/20260114162941if_/https://metasi...
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
What kind of trial is that, and what provision is there for it in the law? Who gets to choose that? The trial is in US federal court in Oakland [0].
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/18/meta-chil...