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.
To be fair, addiction is the problem of the users which have nothing better to do than scroll the app.
To protect teens, Apple, Google and Microsoft must implement one-click "child mode" and block installing or accessing social network in this mode. It is stupid to blame Meta for what is parents and OS developers responsibility. An app should not require selfie and a passport to use it.
UPD: Indeed the subject is selfies and passports, let me quote [1]:
> As part of the case, Torrez was seeking to force Meta to overhaul its apps by implementing features like effective age-verification technologies, altering recommendation algorithms that don’t compromise child well-being and making other modifications that result in “fundamentally restructuring how Meta is allowed to do business in the state,” the AG said at a press briefing before the second phase of the trial began.
> In addition to the abatement fund, Thursday’s order requires Meta to continue improving “age assurance models and tools in New Mexico” using AI, and to attempt “to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model.”
First, children should not be on Facebook, second, there should be no selfies (which is what states want) but instead a one-click "child mode" set up by parents without any selfies.
Also note how journalists hide the main issue deep in the text so that by seeing the header you do not get the real issue and be deceived. Typical propaganda trick.
> addiction is the problem of the users which have nothing better to do than scroll the app
- 1996 Purdue Pharma "began a massive marketing campaign", based on a "unique claim" for OxyContin, with FDA permission, that, "as a long-acting opioid, it might be less likely to cause abuse and addiction than shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet."
- 3 February 2021 Consultancy McKinsey and Company agreed to pay $573 million to 47 state governments to settle claims it advised "Purdue Pharma and other drug makers to aggressively market opioid painkillers."
That doesn’t quite explain why eg parents are scrolling instead of
being attentive to their kids (something that our brains are wired to pay attention to), people are scrolling instead of paying attention while driving, riding a bike, or walking
Even people on their job watch youtube instead of paying attention while riding a train so that they don’t miss red lights (I’ve read of a couple of instances in the news), etc
Apparently, there’s somthing so addictive that our society cannot function properly with everyone glued to screen microdosing dopamine into their brains.
Nobody forces the user to use the app. And from the screenshots I see online, Meta's app, Threads is used mostly by adult people to post dating stories and jokes. Do not consider this dangerous. Instagram is also used mostly by adults. As for Facebook, I do not know who uses it.
You needn't shill for big tech companies; on the contrary, good and sensible regulation has been eroded by all the lobbying efforts these monopolists have done and the pressure of the faux-conservatives that portray themselves as victims of persecution against their free speech rights (when they had been correctly flagged as posting harmful content or hoaxes [0]).
There are a couple of fallacies you've managed to bundle there:
1. Doomscrolling Facebook/Instagram is not equivalent to rest
2. Although rest is a good reward for a hard day's work, you're conflating Social Media Usage with resting, which has been proven to be detrimental to overall well-being [0], and associated with poor sleep quality (i.e. detrimental to rest).
3. You were saying that addiction was a user problem, but now you're acknowledging the addictiveness of the platform
Your response may have been facetious and sarcastic, but your previous replies suggest that that wasn't the case.
> To be fair, addiction is the problem of the users
You're not wrong, per say, but it feels like saying the crack epidemic is the fault of the users, when there's lots of auxiliary factors. There's way more social pressure for social media. Really we're even actively encouraging "crack use" here. There's tv ads and lots of public support. Hell, anyone that deleted their Facebook (especially around or before the Cambridge Analytica scandal) knows how sticky the platform is. Network effects aren't nothing. Hell, just getting my friends to talk to me on Signal rather than WhatsApp or Facebook messenger (which I don't have) is a pain.
You're not wrong that it's an addiction but there's a big difference between a person being addicted to something and a society being addicted. The response should be different because the situation is different
One could go into a reasonable argument about how, people, when given a more stimulating set of activities available, would avoid doom scrolling themselves to death. That misses the point, though perhaps valid: The point here is that a loophole in our reward-machinery became widely abused for profit, after having almost hijacked interpersonal communication while masquerading as a social utility, thus performing what might be the most harmful, misleading, insidious bait-and-switch ever imposed upon mankind.-
I personally enjoy knowing all of them and all of us using the internet for anything other than just looking up the time are teaching AI how to not weigh the importance or believability of a thing.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
We can probably both agree it's difficult or impossible to construct an ethical basis for the unilateral preference of the group over the individual, an easy counterexample is queer rights. So we can't just make whatever rules we think best benefit society: there are ethical limits, and many demographics in the world who still seek liberation from State oppression.
Therefore, any encroachment on the rights of the individual over the rights of the group must be justified. A monopoly on violence is not justification. I am not saying your suggestion is flat-out unethical. But I seek to understand the basis on which you're claiming we as a community have the right to prevent someone from retaining control of their company. I could see one trying to make the case that if the owner commits a serious and relevant crime it might be best to prevent him from doing further harm, but you seem to be suggesting some arbitrary threshold after which a person is not allowed to retain control of their company.
On the basis that public corporations are exclusively a legal construct which can, and indeed already do, have arbitrary rules. Should the individual wish to maintain control over their company they can simply keep it private indefinitely.
And, we have granted them limited liability. Not something anyone, or any group is entitled to. It’s appropriate to condition that special treatment towards our goals.
"Because we can make arbitrary rules" is not a justification or basis. Again, I am not saying it cannot or should not be done; I am asking for the justification.
"Because I can" sounds like what my grandfather used to say while beating the shit out of me for questioning his cult-derived arbitrary doctrine. We can do better than 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (or imprisoned or exiled) 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 preying on the next generations that they were supposed to be building the world for. It's hard to overstate the betrayal the younger generations are facing now when society allows things like public schools partnering with gambling companies to advertise to students instead of building students' character like they're supposed to. In a moral society that would be the scandal of the century.
Anyone can put a blue stripe on top of a web page full of scrolling pictures that have hierarchical chat bubbles underneath, and always could. What is destroying Facebook going to do really?
Put 80,000 people out of work and take a chunk of of everyone's retirement account. Not to mention the second order effect on other tech stocks. It's right there in the comment you're replying to.
But that's boring. Let's pretend Gozilla is real. He's been around for a hundred years, pops up once in a while and wipes out a chunk of a coastal city before swimming back to the deep. Killing Godzilla once and for all would be a clear benefit, save thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of property damage. Governments and militaries and smart people work hard developing death rays and mega bombs and Kaiju-specific viruses and, oh I don't know, really big spears. Perhaps one will succeed.
But, he's been around for a hundred years. A whole industry has grown up around him to mitigate the effects and deal with the fallout. There's rapid-response evacuation blimps and self-erecting submerged delay walls and monster insurance. There are collateralized collateral damage obligations to securitize and spread the cost of compensating property owners for military weapons that miss their target. The financial system does what it does well: taking an existential risk, sticking a price on it, and turning it into profit. And it's not just white collars cashing in: there's entire companies that do nothing but quickly rebuild bridges that he chews up, or recycle building rubble into new skyscrapers. There's a whole smorgasbord of mom-and-pop operations that do things like scraping up and disposing of the gallons of his stinky saliva that clog the streets after a rampage (with a little refining, it proves to be a surprisingly effective self-adhesive sealant for leaking pressure vessels). Others specialize in filling in claw-shaped potholes in asphalt. Yet more insulate small buildings against fire damage. Satellites monitor him; subscription services forecast his movements; one company is developing a promising body armor based on studies of a scute found after an attack in Montevideo.
And then one particularly wild plan actully works. Trapped in a constricting net made of nano-scale monofilament and engineered spider silk, Godzilla dies in the shallows outside Cape Town, South Africa. The world celebrates. The next morning, hungover, everybody defaults on their Godzilla insurance. The value of those securitized policies goes to zero. The CCDOs blow up too: finance's innovation is exceeded only by its myopia. Investors take a beating. It's not 2008, but pretty damn close. The business was actually insanely profitable given that everyone in a coastal city anywhere in the world was at risk. The specialist construction and recycling giants lay off people by the thousand. All the independent niche remediation companies shut up shop. Tens of thousands are out of work.
Instead of dead. Killed regularly. With survivors knowing that it will happen again, the buildings they put up will come back down, and that is the least of their worries because the buildings can indeed be put back up. Unlike the rest of society Godzilla stomped into ruins.
Godzilla is real. It turns populations into needless wastes and flattens entire communities, cities, countries. We're talking about war. You're countering the desire for peace with "but think of Raytheon's profits."
No I'm just saying that slaying the monster has secondary effects. Yes if the whole world one day ate some mushrooms and decided that war was completely over, there would be some upheaval. We would agree that it'd be worth it.
To make my position perfectly clear, I would rather Meta died a slow death than was assassinated by the judiciary. It is better for most - the 80,000 easy-sleeping order followers, my 401(k) - if they take a few big hits and then disintegrate.
Meh. Even assuming the flesh isn't toxic (which it totally is, and radioactive to boot) Godzilla weighs, what, 200,000,000lbs[1] which even at a ridiculous Wagyu price of $300/lb (and assuming every ounce of the bastard is meat) is only 60 billion dollars - the square root of fuck all in this context. And he died in the southern hemisphere summer; it's hot as balls in Cape Town in December so his corpse starts rotting pretty quickly. Certainly faster than you could butcher a hundred thousand ton monster with bombproof skin.
I enjoyed your short story, but not quite the same thing. The employees are the Godzilla, not protecting us from it or cleaning up the damage it causes. Not really sure why we're supposed to be hellbent on preserving the jobs of 80,000 that are actively detrimental to the rest of society. If you work for Godzilla Corp, getting paid a real cushy salary to destroy everything you can, I'd rather you don't have your job, actually. It's not like it's hard to find a new job with Godzilla Corp on your resume, it just might not be as well-paying or cartoonishly evil, to which I would say, suck it up.
Weeeelllll... I was going to just go "fair point" and stop at that but I don't think I entirely agree. Most of those 80k, perhaps all but a few hundred, would do whatever they were told to do. They are the sort of banal evil that just wants a (large) paycheck and a decent annual review. You could pick them up and plop them into another, completely benign tech company doing something totally different and they'd make sure the site ran properly and the backlog was groomed just so.
They're like, er, Godzilla's limbs. For sure, very damaging, but not really directly responsible. His nasty reptile brain is in charge. That's the few hundred at the top that decide that Meta is going to fight these lawsuits or claim they're actually giving kids powerful tools for controlling their online experience or whatever other PR bullshit they barf up every time this happens. That's not some random SRE.
Eh, they are shitbags though; they knew what they were getting into. I'm not advocating for welfare for 'em. So, after that: fair point well made.
The secondary effects of nuking Meta would be pretty severe. The markets really would take a big hit and some (near-) retirees would suffer quite a lot.
Oh God, who's to say it wouldn't go all hydra on us: Meta goes pop, 80,000 well-off sociopaths scatter to hacker spaces around the world and produce a few thousand even worse companies.
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.
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.
Political Affiliation Republican Independent Democrat
Generation Z (born 1997-2007) 17% 56% 27%
Millennials (born 1981-1996) 21% 54% 24%
Generation X (born 1965-1980) 31% 42% 25%
Baby boomers (born 1946-1964) 34% 33% 32%
Silent Generation (born before 1946) 37% 30% 32%
Gen Z is more likely to identify as Independent, less likely to identify as Republican. That's not more conservative, unless you have another poll you're citing?
I don't think that page really backs the argument you are making. The full bullet point seems to be:
> With the exception of millennials (24%), Gen Z adults (28%) are notably less likely than other generational cohorts to identify as conservative. And Gen Z adults (43%) identify as liberal at a higher rate than other generations. A plurality of Gen Z teens (44%) identify as moderate.
Even if slightly more Gen Z adults identify as conservative - 28% vs 24% - it's outweighed on the other side where 43% of Gen Z adults identify as liberal vs 39% of millenials. That still sounds like "Gen Z is more liberal than Millenials" even if the polarization is higher and more independents have grouped themselves into either firmly conservative or firmly liberal.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a Progressive slate that is unpopular with the older electorate isn't going to magically win as Gen Z reaches voting age.
Well I don't disagree there - if it happens it will be hard work, not magic.
The point I am trying to make is that reform is both possible and - I think - conditions are continuing to build towards an inflection point. Over the next decade the oldest and most conservative voting cohorts are likely to die out, just as a younger and comparatively quite liberal cohort is entering adulthood.
This is happening right in the middle of a terribly unpopular war with Iran that is driving up oil costs, combined with inflation and a lot of domestic terror and unrest. If anything, the Trump administration has shown voters what is possible when you get a leader who is ready to throw out decorum and tradition and thumb their nose at the courts.
Young progressives see that and want it for themselves - after all, if Elon Musk can come in and gut half the federal government, seemingly dodging all the existing laws and consequences, why can't some liberal firebrand come in and do the same to the military industrial complex, or the social media companies that experimented on teenagers and intentionally gave a generation eating and self-esteem disorders?
----
Anecdotally, have you been to a local farmer/maker market recently? I'm sure it's regional but here it's not uncommon to see booths selling screen-printed shirts with portraits of Luigi Mangione.
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.”
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.
To be fair, addiction is the problem of the users which have nothing better to do than scroll the app.
To protect teens, Apple, Google and Microsoft must implement one-click "child mode" and block installing or accessing social network in this mode. It is stupid to blame Meta for what is parents and OS developers responsibility. An app should not require selfie and a passport to use it.
UPD: Indeed the subject is selfies and passports, let me quote [1]:
> As part of the case, Torrez was seeking to force Meta to overhaul its apps by implementing features like effective age-verification technologies, altering recommendation algorithms that don’t compromise child well-being and making other modifications that result in “fundamentally restructuring how Meta is allowed to do business in the state,” the AG said at a press briefing before the second phase of the trial began.
> In addition to the abatement fund, Thursday’s order requires Meta to continue improving “age assurance models and tools in New Mexico” using AI, and to attempt “to develop, within two years, a dedicated under-13-years-of-age prediction model.”
First, children should not be on Facebook, second, there should be no selfies (which is what states want) but instead a one-click "child mode" set up by parents without any selfies.
Also note how journalists hide the main issue deep in the text so that by seeing the header you do not get the real issue and be deceived. Typical propaganda trick.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/06/meta-to-pay-into-567-million...
> addiction is the problem of the users which have nothing better to do than scroll the app
- 1996 Purdue Pharma "began a massive marketing campaign", based on a "unique claim" for OxyContin, with FDA permission, that, "as a long-acting opioid, it might be less likely to cause abuse and addiction than shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet."
- 3 February 2021 Consultancy McKinsey and Company agreed to pay $573 million to 47 state governments to settle claims it advised "Purdue Pharma and other drug makers to aggressively market opioid painkillers."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_opioid_epidemi...
give it 25 years i guess
That doesn’t quite explain why eg parents are scrolling instead of being attentive to their kids (something that our brains are wired to pay attention to), people are scrolling instead of paying attention while driving, riding a bike, or walking Even people on their job watch youtube instead of paying attention while riding a train so that they don’t miss red lights (I’ve read of a couple of instances in the news), etc
Apparently, there’s somthing so addictive that our society cannot function properly with everyone glued to screen microdosing dopamine into their brains.
Indeed, I’m impressed Apple dodges the blame for creating the hardware that enables the addiction just as much as the apps.
Not at all, the problem is with the apps that are carefully designed to create that in users.
Nobody forces the user to use the app. And from the screenshots I see online, Meta's app, Threads is used mostly by adult people to post dating stories and jokes. Do not consider this dangerous. Instagram is also used mostly by adults. As for Facebook, I do not know who uses it.
You needn't shill for big tech companies; on the contrary, good and sensible regulation has been eroded by all the lobbying efforts these monopolists have done and the pressure of the faux-conservatives that portray themselves as victims of persecution against their free speech rights (when they had been correctly flagged as posting harmful content or hoaxes [0]).
[0]: https://youtu.be/nf7XHR3EVHo
But if Facebook made feed less addictive, would not it become more boring and hard-working Joe would not be able to have a rest after a working day?
There are a couple of fallacies you've managed to bundle there:
1. Doomscrolling Facebook/Instagram is not equivalent to rest
2. Although rest is a good reward for a hard day's work, you're conflating Social Media Usage with resting, which has been proven to be detrimental to overall well-being [0], and associated with poor sleep quality (i.e. detrimental to rest).
3. You were saying that addiction was a user problem, but now you're acknowledging the addictiveness of the platform
Your response may have been facetious and sarcastic, but your previous replies suggest that that wasn't the case.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12529-025-10411-9...
You're not wrong that it's an addiction but there's a big difference between a person being addicted to something and a society being addicted. The response should be different because the situation is different
lots of people have better things to do and still scroll the app
> To be fair, addiction is the problem of the users which have nothing better to do than scroll the app.
That is not fair at all. Meta spent millions A/B testing and engineering the most addictive product possible. On purpose.
It is entirely fair to blame them for the addictive result. And for outrage they intentionally engineer too.
One could go into a reasonable argument about how, people, when given a more stimulating set of activities available, would avoid doom scrolling themselves to death. That misses the point, though perhaps valid: The point here is that a loophole in our reward-machinery became widely abused for profit, after having almost hijacked interpersonal communication while masquerading as a social utility, thus performing what might be the most harmful, misleading, insidious bait-and-switch ever imposed upon mankind.-
I read about New Mexico decision and the court ordered to implement age verification. Addiction is just an excuse.
I personally enjoy knowing all of them and all of us using the internet for anything other than just looking up the time are teaching AI how to not weigh the importance or believability of a thing.
Losing WhatsApp would be pretty painful for me, personally.
There will be something else
Considering it was all done intentionally and on behalf of Israel; No.
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.
why just meta and not also instagram and tiktok?
Instagram is Meta.
Facebook purchased Instagram in 2012.
Never gonna happen, meta is too big. But you can hope.
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.
First break up MS though.
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.
This should be illegal.
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 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...
> It should never be illegal, to give fools the opportunity to be parted with their money.
"Legalize Ponzi schemes and three-card Monte" is certainly an opinion.
> 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?
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.
But on what basis?
Public limited liability companies are a creation of law and government. We can make whatever rules we think best benefit society.
Yes, but the question is why do you believe that particular rule would benefit society.
But on what basis?
We can probably both agree it's difficult or impossible to construct an ethical basis for the unilateral preference of the group over the individual, an easy counterexample is queer rights. So we can't just make whatever rules we think best benefit society: there are ethical limits, and many demographics in the world who still seek liberation from State oppression.
Therefore, any encroachment on the rights of the individual over the rights of the group must be justified. A monopoly on violence is not justification. I am not saying your suggestion is flat-out unethical. But I seek to understand the basis on which you're claiming we as a community have the right to prevent someone from retaining control of their company. I could see one trying to make the case that if the owner commits a serious and relevant crime it might be best to prevent him from doing further harm, but you seem to be suggesting some arbitrary threshold after which a person is not allowed to retain control of their company.
On the basis that they are not entitled to limited liability. It’s an enormous grant from the public. We have every right to add conditions.
On the basis that public corporations are exclusively a legal construct which can, and indeed already do, have arbitrary rules. Should the individual wish to maintain control over their company they can simply keep it private indefinitely.
And, we have granted them limited liability. Not something anyone, or any group is entitled to. It’s appropriate to condition that special treatment towards our goals.
"Because we can make arbitrary rules" is not a justification or basis. Again, I am not saying it cannot or should not be done; I am asking for the justification.
"Because I can" sounds like what my grandfather used to say while beating the shit out of me for questioning his cult-derived arbitrary doctrine. We can do better than 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.
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.
How terrible is this alternative:
Mental health exam for C-suite once company hits billion dollar valuation, no sociopaths allowed.
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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.
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.
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.
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 (or imprisoned or exiled) 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 preying on the next generations that they were supposed to be building the world for. It's hard to overstate the betrayal the younger generations are facing now when society allows things like public schools partnering with gambling companies to advertise to students instead of building students' character like they're supposed to. In a moral society that would be the scandal of the century.
Anyone can put a blue stripe on top of a web page full of scrolling pictures that have hierarchical chat bubbles underneath, and always could. What is destroying Facebook going to do really?
Put 80,000 people out of work and take a chunk of of everyone's retirement account. Not to mention the second order effect on other tech stocks. It's right there in the comment you're replying to.
But that's boring. Let's pretend Gozilla is real. He's been around for a hundred years, pops up once in a while and wipes out a chunk of a coastal city before swimming back to the deep. Killing Godzilla once and for all would be a clear benefit, save thousands of lives and trillions of dollars of property damage. Governments and militaries and smart people work hard developing death rays and mega bombs and Kaiju-specific viruses and, oh I don't know, really big spears. Perhaps one will succeed.
But, he's been around for a hundred years. A whole industry has grown up around him to mitigate the effects and deal with the fallout. There's rapid-response evacuation blimps and self-erecting submerged delay walls and monster insurance. There are collateralized collateral damage obligations to securitize and spread the cost of compensating property owners for military weapons that miss their target. The financial system does what it does well: taking an existential risk, sticking a price on it, and turning it into profit. And it's not just white collars cashing in: there's entire companies that do nothing but quickly rebuild bridges that he chews up, or recycle building rubble into new skyscrapers. There's a whole smorgasbord of mom-and-pop operations that do things like scraping up and disposing of the gallons of his stinky saliva that clog the streets after a rampage (with a little refining, it proves to be a surprisingly effective self-adhesive sealant for leaking pressure vessels). Others specialize in filling in claw-shaped potholes in asphalt. Yet more insulate small buildings against fire damage. Satellites monitor him; subscription services forecast his movements; one company is developing a promising body armor based on studies of a scute found after an attack in Montevideo.
And then one particularly wild plan actully works. Trapped in a constricting net made of nano-scale monofilament and engineered spider silk, Godzilla dies in the shallows outside Cape Town, South Africa. The world celebrates. The next morning, hungover, everybody defaults on their Godzilla insurance. The value of those securitized policies goes to zero. The CCDOs blow up too: finance's innovation is exceeded only by its myopia. Investors take a beating. It's not 2008, but pretty damn close. The business was actually insanely profitable given that everyone in a coastal city anywhere in the world was at risk. The specialist construction and recycling giants lay off people by the thousand. All the independent niche remediation companies shut up shop. Tens of thousands are out of work.
Same thing, innit.
> Tens of thousands are out of work.
Instead of dead. Killed regularly. With survivors knowing that it will happen again, the buildings they put up will come back down, and that is the least of their worries because the buildings can indeed be put back up. Unlike the rest of society Godzilla stomped into ruins.
Godzilla is real. It turns populations into needless wastes and flattens entire communities, cities, countries. We're talking about war. You're countering the desire for peace with "but think of Raytheon's profits."
No I'm just saying that slaying the monster has secondary effects. Yes if the whole world one day ate some mushrooms and decided that war was completely over, there would be some upheaval. We would agree that it'd be worth it.
To make my position perfectly clear, I would rather Meta died a slow death than was assassinated by the judiciary. It is better for most - the 80,000 easy-sleeping order followers, my 401(k) - if they take a few big hits and then disintegrate.
That would be offset by a one-time surplus of Godzilla meat.
Meh. Even assuming the flesh isn't toxic (which it totally is, and radioactive to boot) Godzilla weighs, what, 200,000,000lbs[1] which even at a ridiculous Wagyu price of $300/lb (and assuming every ounce of the bastard is meat) is only 60 billion dollars - the square root of fuck all in this context. And he died in the southern hemisphere summer; it's hot as balls in Cape Town in December so his corpse starts rotting pretty quickly. Certainly faster than you could butcher a hundred thousand ton monster with bombproof skin.
[1] https://x.com/TohoKingdom/status/1129168820944265216 screengrab from Monarch showing fatty's weight at 99,600 tons.
I enjoyed your short story, but not quite the same thing. The employees are the Godzilla, not protecting us from it or cleaning up the damage it causes. Not really sure why we're supposed to be hellbent on preserving the jobs of 80,000 that are actively detrimental to the rest of society. If you work for Godzilla Corp, getting paid a real cushy salary to destroy everything you can, I'd rather you don't have your job, actually. It's not like it's hard to find a new job with Godzilla Corp on your resume, it just might not be as well-paying or cartoonishly evil, to which I would say, suck it up.
Weeeelllll... I was going to just go "fair point" and stop at that but I don't think I entirely agree. Most of those 80k, perhaps all but a few hundred, would do whatever they were told to do. They are the sort of banal evil that just wants a (large) paycheck and a decent annual review. You could pick them up and plop them into another, completely benign tech company doing something totally different and they'd make sure the site ran properly and the backlog was groomed just so.
They're like, er, Godzilla's limbs. For sure, very damaging, but not really directly responsible. His nasty reptile brain is in charge. That's the few hundred at the top that decide that Meta is going to fight these lawsuits or claim they're actually giving kids powerful tools for controlling their online experience or whatever other PR bullshit they barf up every time this happens. That's not some random SRE.
Eh, they are shitbags though; they knew what they were getting into. I'm not advocating for welfare for 'em. So, after that: fair point well made.
The secondary effects of nuking Meta would be pretty severe. The markets really would take a big hit and some (near-) retirees would suffer quite a lot.
Oh God, who's to say it wouldn't go all hydra on us: Meta goes pop, 80,000 well-off sociopaths scatter to hacker spaces around the world and produce a few thousand even worse companies.
> A new CEO for sure.
And 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.
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.
(Gen Z is more conservative than Millennials.)
Per Gallup in 2026:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-politi...Gen Z is more likely to identify as Independent, less likely to identify as Republican. That's not more conservative, unless you have another poll you're citing?
(Gen Z is not more conservative than Millenials.)
I'm seeing 28% Conservative for gen z and 24% for millennials. (And 21% Republican identifying in both groups.) https://prri.org/research/generation-zs-views-on-generationa...
I don't think that page really backs the argument you are making. The full bullet point seems to be:
> With the exception of millennials (24%), Gen Z adults (28%) are notably less likely than other generational cohorts to identify as conservative. And Gen Z adults (43%) identify as liberal at a higher rate than other generations. A plurality of Gen Z teens (44%) identify as moderate.
Even if slightly more Gen Z adults identify as conservative - 28% vs 24% - it's outweighed on the other side where 43% of Gen Z adults identify as liberal vs 39% of millenials. That still sounds like "Gen Z is more liberal than Millenials" even if the polarization is higher and more independents have grouped themselves into either firmly conservative or firmly liberal.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a Progressive slate that is unpopular with the older electorate isn't going to magically win as Gen Z reaches voting age.
Well I don't disagree there - if it happens it will be hard work, not magic.
The point I am trying to make is that reform is both possible and - I think - conditions are continuing to build towards an inflection point. Over the next decade the oldest and most conservative voting cohorts are likely to die out, just as a younger and comparatively quite liberal cohort is entering adulthood.
This is happening right in the middle of a terribly unpopular war with Iran that is driving up oil costs, combined with inflation and a lot of domestic terror and unrest. If anything, the Trump administration has shown voters what is possible when you get a leader who is ready to throw out decorum and tradition and thumb their nose at the courts.
Young progressives see that and want it for themselves - after all, if Elon Musk can come in and gut half the federal government, seemingly dodging all the existing laws and consequences, why can't some liberal firebrand come in and do the same to the military industrial complex, or the social media companies that experimented on teenagers and intentionally gave a generation eating and self-esteem disorders?
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Anecdotally, have you been to a local farmer/maker market recently? I'm sure it's regional but here it's not uncommon to see booths selling screen-printed shirts with portraits of Luigi Mangione.
People are angry.
Please provide data for your claim.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49325937
This is madness.
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.”
I think they've proven they deserve whatever consequences we can muster.