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on Gopher (inofficial)
(HTM) Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
(HTM) Meta told to pay $375M for misleading users over child safety
tremon wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
"told to pay"? As in, they're not even fined? What a horrible choice of
headline.
bergheim wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
What is so fucked up about this is that THEIR WHOLE RAISON D'ÃTRE is
knowing more about you than you do.
You think they need this to know your age? Your gender? Your home, your
birthplace, your political stance?
NickC25 wrote 1 hour 42 min ago:
1. This fine is 1/100th the size it should be. Make them pay, and
break up Meta/facebook.
2. Age verification pushes coming from several different actors across
gov't and private sector is worrying. I trust no actor here, and
neither should you.
3. Zuck should be in jail.
CobrastanJorji wrote 2 hours 10 min ago:
"We remain confident in our record of protecting teens online," said
the company that clearly was not punished enough to hurt their
confidence.
kevincloudsec wrote 3 hours 2 min ago:
the fine is 0.6% of last year's profit. the lobbying budget probably
costs more.
josefritzishere wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Meta can do more and should do more. I think that's the short of it.
The company made 59 Billion last year. It's completely reasonable to
expect that they expend effort and budget on reducing their harm to
children.
girishso wrote 3 hours 22 min ago:
Why do we call this company "Meta"? It's the same old "Facebook".
swiftcoder wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
Given that they just shuttered their "metaverse", I'm guessing we
won't have to for much longer...
NERD_ALERT wrote 3 hours 18 min ago:
The name of the company is literally Meta. Thatâs why people call
it thatâ¦
dangus wrote 3 hours 23 min ago:
This is less than 4 days of profit.
vpShane wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
Make the fine scale, and fit the severity of the issue. This should be
$375 Billion not $375 Million. These are our future generations they're
destroying.
NooneAtAll3 wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
can someone explain how the fine size is calculated?
whamlastxmas wrote 3 hours 26 min ago:
Head of a chicken is cut off over a giant dart board, and wherever
its headless body lands determines the fine
fny wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
This fine from New Mexico is about 0.6% of Meta's annual profit.
If all 50 states sue at the same rate, that'll be a 30% dent, and I'm
sure states can sue for more than 0.6% too. That would be historic
action against malfeasance and would send a strong FAFO single to all
corporates.
Let's lobby for it.
rimbo789 wrote 3 hours 11 min ago:
Why stopped at the 50 states? Loop in the rest of the world
mattfrommars wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Thatâs good! We need to protect our children.
But who gets the $375 million dollars? Anyone know the cut the law firm
will get from this incredible amount of money?
elAhmo wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
They earn this in around 16 hours.
ChrisArchitect wrote 4 hours 42 min ago:
[dupe] Earlier:
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47509984
fuzzfactor wrote 4 hours 52 min ago:
I don't know who they have to pay it to but that's only for New Mexico,
which has about two million people which works out to about $187.50 per
person.
That's pretty cheap when it comes to deception.
The eyes of Texas should be upon this, which is 15X the size and should
not settle for less than $1000 per person, where deceptive trade
practice is much more serious than other places.
Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of a
deterrent either.
But there are probably plenty of people for whom a $5000 one-time
payment might not come close to being fair compensation for what's
already happened, especially with Meta allowed to continue as an
ongoing concern, that's got to be psychologically harmful.
To really fix it each state would have to follow "suit" while greatly
upping the ante so there's at least hundreds of billions at stake.
Meta can afford it and who else is responsible for so much widespread
sneaky deception at this scale for so long ?
NickC25 wrote 2 hours 8 min ago:
>Now that would set a $30 billion example which may not be enough of
a deterrent either.
Mark's personally worth more than 10x that, Facebook's got a 1.7
trillion market cap, so it really wouldn't move the needle for them.
Cost of doing business and whatnot.
throw7 wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
If Meta did advertise the "safety of its platforms for young users"
then they should be held accountable for that. It seems clear from the
whistleblowers that Meta had internal data that they knew they were not
safe for young users, but Zuck gotta get those ads($$$) in front of
young kids.
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 2 hours 59 min ago:
Modern cigarette companies
groundzeros2015 wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Lots of negative meta sentiment the past few months. Feeling a bit like
2021 and wondering if itâs time to buy?
zombot wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
Still just a drop in the bucket compared to their quarterly profits.
When will regulators get wise?
csense wrote 5 hours 10 min ago:
We used to believe in freedom of speech and freedom of association.
Since the dawn of the Internet era, we've had a legal principle that
platforms are relatively shielded from liability for what their users
do.
It's the Internet. There's sexual content and sketchy characters on
it. Occasionally people will encounter them -- even if they're under
18.
Anyone who grew up in the mid-1990s or later, think back to your own
Internet usage when you were under 18. You probably found something
NSFW or NSFL, dealt with it, and came out basically OK after applying
your common sense. Maybe it was shocking and mildly traumatizing --
but having negative experience is how we grow. Part of growing up is
honing one's sense of "that link is staying blue" or "I'm not
comfortable with this, it's time to GTFO". And it seems a lot safer if
you encounter the sketchy side of humanity from the other side of a
screen. Think about how a young person's exposure to the underbelly of
humanity might have gone in pre-Internet times: Get invited to a
party, find out it's in the bad part of town and there are a bunch of
sketchy people there -- well, you're exposed to all kinds of physical
risks. You can't leave the party as easily as you can put your phone
down.
I stopped logging onto Facebook regularly around 2009; I only log in a
couple times a year. I hate what Facebook has become in the past
decade and a half.
But giving a site with millions of users a multi-hundred-million-dollar
fine because some of those users behave badly seems...asinine.
If your kid is old enough and responsible enough to be given
unsupervised Internet access, you'd better teach them how to deal with
the skeevy stuff they might encounter.
danny_codes wrote 3 hours 37 min ago:
Thatâs not really true. Pre-internet we had relatively much
stricter content controls. Fairness doctrine springs to mind, plus
significant regulation of the movie industry.
Letting companies sell addiction has pretty significant negative
externalities. Thatâs why we regulate gambling and drugs. Facebook
sells addiction, so it makes sense to regulate it like we do drugs
and gambling.
BrtByte wrote 4 hours 53 min ago:
I think the difference is scale and targeting
Dotnaught wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
>we've had a legal principle that platforms are relatively shielded
from liability for what their users do.
...when they've made a good faith effort to address harms.
Beefin wrote 5 hours 11 min ago:
This is a good flag that you should be rolling your own safety checks.
It's not hard, here's a writeup of an ancillary problem/solution:
(HTM) [1]: https://mixpeek.com/blog/ip-safety-pre-publication-clearance
luxuryballs wrote 5 hours 23 min ago:
and who gets that money ^^
Alen_P wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
Most Facebook users are basically teenagers, so it's no wonder it took
them this long to add any real restrictions...or maybe they just wanted
us to think they cared.
zeeshana07x wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
Fines like this only work if they're large enough to change behavior.
$375M for a company Meta's size is more of an accounting entry than a
deterrent.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
What is Metaâs revenue in New Mexico?
Also, âthe total civil penalty of $375m was reached after the jury
decided there were thousands of violations of the act, each with a
maximum penalty of $5,000.
Meta is also involved in a separate trial in Los Angeles, in which a
young woman claims that she became addicted to platforms like
Instagram and YouTube, owned by Google, as a child because of how
they are intentionally designed.
There are thousands of similar lawsuits winding their way through the
US courts.â
tremon wrote 46 min ago:
Wait, what? This case's central argument was about propagating and
promoting child sexual abuse material, but the maximum penalty was
set to only $5000 per violation? Why?
JumpCrisscross wrote 31 min ago:
> The jury found that Meta was responsible for violating New
Mexico's Unfair Practices Act because it misled the public about
the safety of its platforms for young users
âThe jury found that Meta was responsible for violating New
Mexico's Unfair Practices Act because it misled the public about
the safety of its platforms for young users.â
So the penalty is for misleading around CSAM. Not CSAM per se.
(My understanding is the latter are still being adjudicated.)
CabSauce wrote 4 hours 30 min ago:
While true, this is just one pretty small state. There are others.
rimbo789 wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
That penalty is about a couple orders of magnitude too small
badpenny wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
0.6% of last year's profits.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
> 0.6% of last year's profits
New Mexico is 0.6% of the U.S. population [1] 2.13mm [2] 342mm
(HTM) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Mexico
(HTM) [2]: https://www.census.gov/popclock/
Aboutplants wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Why canât penalties be tied to a percentage of Revenue?
Ylpertnodi wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
GDPR.
vscode-rest wrote 5 hours 44 min ago:
You think if mom and pop shop did they same theyâd be charged the
same?
muskyFelon wrote 5 hours 52 min ago:
Regulate and fine social media and adtech companies until its no longer
economically feasible to generate the massive profits and stock
valuations that is prompting this garbage.
gotwaz wrote 5 hours 6 min ago:
Just have to read the quarterly conference calls between Zuck and
Wall Street. Both groups are in total denial. And will be till we
never hear from Zuck ever again.
matheusmoreira wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
Just break them all up via antitrust enforcement. It's increasingly
becoming clear that society will degenerate into cyberpunk
technofeudalism otherwise.
m3kw9 wrote 5 hours 55 min ago:
Calculated risk cost by them
kgwxd wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
Shareholders: Worth it!
cs702 wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
That's peanuts.[a]
[a]
(HTM) [1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/peanuts
anthk wrote 6 hours 16 min ago:
Now sue them for lobbying against GNU/Linux with CSA, their front
lobby.
exabrial wrote 6 hours 27 min ago:
That fine is missing a few zeros on the right side
pluc wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
It's not a fine it's a fee
sarbanharble wrote 6 hours 34 min ago:
It takes 7 clicks to turn off ads that promote eating disorders. Thats
enough proof.
dawnerd wrote 3 hours 29 min ago:
You can click infinite times not interested on dangerous or adult
reels and theyâll just show up more and more.
criddell wrote 4 hours 7 min ago:
What's an example of an ad promoting an eating disorder? Are ads for
eating disorders more difficult to turn off than other types of ads?
t1234s wrote 6 hours 39 min ago:
Who is getting paid the $375m?
bilekas wrote 5 hours 51 min ago:
The state of New Mexico presumably as they brought the suit.
Ylpertnodi wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
...so, not only the EU does this kind of thing.
kstrauser wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
Sues companies breaking the law? Iâm glad we still do some of
that here.
cynicalsecurity wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
As much as everyone hates Meta for selling people's personal data, this
is absolutely ridiculous. The hysteria regarding forcing companies do
parents' job doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
danny_codes wrote 3 hours 33 min ago:
By this logic tobacco companies did nothing wrong when they pretended
like smoking didnât cause cancer for decades. Misleading users is
harm.
bilekas wrote 5 hours 49 min ago:
Requiring ID to browse the internet is doing the parents jobs of
managing what their kids are doing online.
Stopping misleading advertisments and mental health issues while
claiming to be protecting children is not on the parents. The parents
were given the false information to believe their kids would be safe.
cynicalsecurity wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
I've never seen Meta advertising themselves as a kindergarten or a
playground for kids. They have always been perceived as public
square or forum. It's wild to leave your child alone in public
place and expect safety.
tartoran wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Oh please! Itâs not about parenting, itâs a cancer on society and
now affecting the youngest and also the seniors.
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 6 hours 44 min ago:
Repeal section 230
kyledrake wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
Careful what you wish for
(HTM) [1]: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
kstrauser wrote 5 hours 12 min ago:
Why do you dislike the Internet?
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 4 hours 49 min ago:
I love the internet. I hate what a lack of liability for platforms
has done to the internet.
HardwareLust wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
$375M isn't even a slap on the wrist for a company that raked in $60B
last year.
shevy-java wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
Meta should be disbanded for the damage it caused to mankind. Age
verification tainting Linux also is heavily attributable to Meta buying
legislation; systemd already quickly went that path, in order to
appease their corporate-gods. Private user data to be released to
random actors willy-nilly style - and the constant appeasement "no,
this is not what is happening". Until it suddenly is happening
precisely as people predicted it to be happening. Everyone runs a
meta-agenda nowadays, Meta more than most others.
quux wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
âPay them, in the scheme of things itâs a speeding ticketâ
RagnarD wrote 7 hours 20 min ago:
Drop in the bucket for them. Giving Zuck some jail time would be the
more appropriate message - there's no doubt he knows and approves of
the kind of evil activity the New Mexico law enforcement dug up.
deepvibrations wrote 6 hours 52 min ago:
That would be a dream, but cannot see it happening.
But totally agree with your theory- platforms should face genuine
legal exposure for algorithmic harm to minors (as tobacco companies
did for health harm).
Unfortunately, as we found out recently, Meta's lobbyists are a
powerful force to contend with and I do not trust our governments to
stand up to them.
intended wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
This particular verdict is a long time coming. How it drives meaningful
change is the bigger question.
One of the challenges we need to resolve is the race to the bottom for
online communities - engagement metrics will always result in a PH
level that supports more acerbic behavior.
Thereâs multiple analyses that you can find, if not your own
experience, to believe that we should be able to do better with our
information commons.
Just today, I found a paper that studied a corpus of Twitter
discussions and found that bad-faith interactions constituted 68.3% of
all replies (Twitter data).
The engineer and analyst side of us will always question these types of
analyses.
Iâve read enough papers at this point for the methods to matter more
than the conclusion.
1) meta, and the other tech platforms need to open up their research
and data. NDAs and business incentives prevent us from having the
boring technical conversations.
2) tech needs someone else to be the bogeyman - the way we did for
tobacco. The profit incentive ensures profitable predatory features
pass review. Expecting firms to ignore quarterly shareholder reviews
for warm fuzzies is ⦠setting ourselves up for failure.
Regulators (with teeth) need to be propped up so that the right amount
of predictable friction (liability) is introduced.
3) tech firms need an opportunity or forum to come clean. The sheer gap
between the practical reality of something like content moderation vs
the ignorance of users and regulators - results in surprise and outrage
when people find out how the sausage is made.
4) algorithm defaults decide the median experience for participants in
our shred market place of ideas. The defaults need to be set in a
manner that works for humans and society (whatever that might be).
Economies are systems to align incentives to achieve subjective goals.
0ckpuppet wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
the leaders of these companies don'tlet their kids use it.
mrweasel wrote 7 hours 3 min ago:
I doubt that Zuckerberg really uses either Facebook or Instagram all
that much. Maybe as a curated PR channel sure, but he's not doom
scrolling Instagram at bedtime.
If you know what the platform is capable of, if you seen how the
sausage is made, you're probably not using it.
People are also a little naive in not seeing that these platforms
aren't just bad for children, they are bad for adults as well. I'm
not oppose to not "selling" them to children, but we also need to
label correctly for adults and have rules like those for alcohol,
tobakko and gambling, so no or limited advertising. Scrub the public
spaces of Facebook logos.
kakacik wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Discussions from proper experts about absolute toxicity of social
networks in their implementation are at least... 15 years old at
this point? At least that, and I am not talking about rare article
here and there but onslaught of articles in popular media from all
sides. But parents... mostly didn't give a fuck.
Lets admit it, in same vein trump is a symptom of current US
society, the approach and effects of social networks we allow them
to be is a result of how lazy and thus addicted people got. On top
of many of the parents doing exactly the same, then don't expect
miracles.
One thing that I don't understand - even here, some folks call that
sociopathic amoral piece of shit 'zuck' and treat his empire like
some sort of semi-charity. When I attacked facebook company in the
past, there was always a lot of defense (look at this open sourced
stuff, look at that... which I presume came from either direct
employees or clueless stock holders). People are people, deeply
flawed and often weak without willingness to admit it to
themselves.
c-flow wrote 6 hours 50 min ago:
I'm not sure if it's naiveté, it's probably more that we are all
complacent. If all Facebook/Instagram users (and perhaps, even if
only those with children), stopped using, that would be an actual
stick, wouldn't it.. But we don't (I'm not excluding myself).
vladms wrote 5 hours 34 min ago:
Deeper than that, it might be food for thought if someone can't
stop doom scrolling. It does not matter the platform, if people
are "addicted" to "bad news" it might be the person at the corner
of the street ("the end is nigh! repent!"), the pharmacy next
block or something else.
I personally stopped using Facebook because it was annoying me
with useless doom and aggressive comments of people on stupid
topics. If it would have showed me only cat pictures (like
Instagrams does) or reasonable stuff (news, etc.) I would have
continued using it.
nixass wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Oh no those pesky Europeans extorting money from US tech companies.
No, wait..
andrewstuart wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Age verification isnât misleading is it?
androiddrew wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Alternative headline: household spyware cash machine forced to pay $20
for being bad.
If you want to punish Meta then you have to punish the wonder boy who
runs it. Not even share holders can fight off the guy spending 80B on
the metaverse.
dwedge wrote 8 hours 9 min ago:
Maybe I'm just getting old and cynical but, while I think current
social media is bad for children, I'm very suspicious of the current
international agreement that it's time to take action, especially with
all the ID verification coming from multiple avenues
barbazoo wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
There's no agreement other than maybe that social media is bad for
children. To get kids off of there you need to identify who's a kid
and who isn't. Same with alcohol and tobacco. Obviously people
shouldn't give their ID to Meta and hopefully many will not but those
that do, for me, as someone who doesn't use social media, that's a
small price to pay to keep kids off. Again, Meta is completely
optional, it's a platform to share stupid videos, no one NEEDS to be
there.
afavour wrote 2 hours 51 min ago:
Meta spent $2bn lobbying for this ID verification stuff:
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47361235
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
Iâm deeply worried by how uncritical these responses are. Meta is
removing end-to-end encryption specifically because these lawsuits
are trying to claim end-to-end encryption is a tool for child abuse.
The âthink of the childrenâ angle is the perfect angle to
pressure companies to make communications readable by the government.
And here tech audiences are welcoming it and applauding because they
couldnât read past the headline and they think anything that hurts
Zuck is good.
How anyone can see this happening and not draw the connections to
Discord and other services also pushing ID checks is beyond me.
Believing that this will only apply to services that donât effect
you is short sighted.
kgwxd wrote 5 hours 56 min ago:
Really? You still think you're the one looking at it all wrong? It's
exactly what you think it is. Stop giving blatant malice the benefit
of the doubt, especially the doubt they've directly instilled.
b00ty4breakfast wrote 6 hours 32 min ago:
That's because we should be regulating the social media industry
rather than regulating social media users.
Unfortunately, social media users don't have billions of dollars to
spend on lobbying and related activities around the world.
jimbokun wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
The ask is to treat users differently based on age. How can they
do that without verifying their users age?
autoexec wrote 37 min ago:
You honestly think facebook has no idea that the children using
their website are children? The combination of the children's
selfies, social network, GPS coordinates, and posts make it very
clear. Facebook already knows who the children are and they've
been explicitly targeting them accordingly.
b00ty4breakfast wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
we should be removing the harmful aspects of modern social, which
are harmful for everyone not just minors, by making them
unprofitable or even outright illegal.
Instead we are saying "only adults should use this" which, while
technically regulating the industry, places the restriction on
users.
We're treating it like tobacco or alcohol (2 industries who have
similarly spent millions upon millions of dollars in lobbying
efforts) but we should be treating it like asbestos.
jimbokun wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
OK, so what would be in the text of this law making it
enforceable and not easily game-able by the social media
companies and without severe unintended consequences?
dminik wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
Why are you asking lawmaker questions of people on HN? What
kind of answer are you expecting?
Just because I don't know how to write a law that can prevent
it doesn't mean that I can't recognize an actual issue when I
see it.
jimbokun wrote 9 min ago:
Because people like you then go and vote for politicians
without actually understanding what they are proposing.
It's all Trump style "believe me I know how to fix it" and
you will vote for the person that pushes your buttons
regardless of whether they have a plausible solution or
not.
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
> That's because we should be regulating the social media industry
rather than regulating social media users.
These lawsuits and regulations are against the industry, not the
users.
The regulations and lawsuits are driving the pressure to ID check
users and remove end-to-end encryption.
gostsamo wrote 7 hours 26 min ago:
because it is a false dilemma
lionkor wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
A lot of the ID verification stuff is coming FROM those companies
boysenberry wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
Iâve just been stung by iOS 26.4âs implementation of the
age-gate. My only option has been to rollback with a 26.3.1 IPSW.
I unlurked and made a thread last night, but I think it might be
hidden due to account age:
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511919
Ajedi32 wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Yep, your post and this comment were hidden. I vouched for them
so they're visible now. Good luck!
raincole wrote 7 hours 41 min ago:
Governments always want censorship and speech control. That never
changes. The only difference is that now the general populace has
accumulated enough disgruntlement to social media to be used against
themselves.
gmerc wrote 7 hours 32 min ago:
No the difference is that when governments are still constrained by
the rule of law itâs cheap PR to fight the government on data
access claims but once they are authoritarian fascist
industrialists fall over themselves to feed everything into
Palantir
expedition32 wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
Tech bros deliberately made digital crack for kids and corporations
refuse to moderate online content.
There is no conspiracy the general public is faced with a crisis and
they are desperate for a solution.
The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
Manuel_D wrote 5 hours 9 min ago:
> The teen suicide statistics do not lie.
Teen suicide rates in the US are lower now than they were in the
1990s.
expedition32 wrote 51 min ago:
The world is bigger than the US.
Anyway you can go on HN and deny there is a problem but you will
lose public opinion and crucially the voting booth.
Manuel_D wrote 14 min ago:
The fine was levied in a US court.
claaams wrote 4 hours 50 min ago:
This doesnât paint the entire picture. Suicide rates peaked in
1990 and then declined to its lowest point in 2007 from there the
rates started rising again.
Manuel_D wrote 4 hours 16 min ago:
Like all metrics, they fluctuate over time. But they've
remained pretty for decades stable at around 10 per 100k per
year. The recent rise doesn't really coincide with social media
adoption. By 2008, >80% of teens were using social media. If
social media adoption was driving the increase in suicides, we
would have started to see a rise in suicides around the early
2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008. But that adoption of
social media by teens was coupled with a decrease in suicides.
The more recent rise in teen suicides occurred during a period
of largely flat teen social media adoption (because nearly 100%
of them were already on social media by the end of the 2000s).
This idea of teen suicide painting a clear picture about the
impact of social media just isn't borne out by the data. And
lastly, people ought to remember that teens have the lowest
rate of suicide among any age cohort.
johnmaguire wrote 44 min ago:
> If social media adoption was driving the increase in
suicides, we would have started to see a rise in suicides
around the early 2000s, reaching it's peak around 2008.
I think there is a logical fallacy here. Social media has not
remained stable since 2008. For one thing, 2008 social media
used the chronological timeline. For another, it didn't show
"recommended" (or sponsored) content in your feed. There was
no TikTok. Facebook was relatively new and MySpace was not
even really feed-based as I recall.
Manuel_D wrote 15 min ago:
Facebook moved away from chronological timelines as default
in 2011. YouTube added "recommended" videos tab in 2007.
dwedge wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis. This
has been a problem for at least a decade, yet suddenly it's at the
forefront and conveniently ties into ID verification for everyone
to use general purpose computing.
I'm sorry but if you don't think there's a conspiracy I have a
bridge to sell you. It was already unveiled that Meta has lobbied
billions towards promoting this legislative change
intended wrote 5 hours 2 min ago:
Oh hell no!
Its been decades of work to even get social media to court.
No one wants to talk about this or look at the issues when itâs
not sexy.
$@&$$ - Iâve been at conferences and had safety teams cry on my
shoulder about how THEY donât get engineering resources if they
ask for it.
Tech platforms suppress so much research and hold so much data
hostage, that an entire research coalition based on independence
from tech.
Zuck and tech as a whole pivoted to drop safety investments the
moment this government came to power.
And this is for user in frikking America !
The shit that is going down in the rest of the world is a curse.
The sheer amount of NCII that exists, with zero recourse for
people whose lives are destroyed is insane.
dminik wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
> Zuck and tech as a whole pivoted to drop safety investments
the moment this government came to power.
I think the question to ask here is, if both Meta and the
current administration don't care about child safety, why is
the age verification stuff going so smoothly? Is helping them
do this really the right move?
jimbokun wrote 5 hours 26 min ago:
You're arguing there's a conspiracy, but even if there is, what
is the best action for governments to take given the devastating
impact social media has been demonstrated to have on young people
especially?
dwedge wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
I donât know what the solution is, but introducing mass
surveillance of ALL users on their own devices hurts the
general population - do you think it will solve the problem?
kgwxd wrote 5 hours 39 min ago:
> The general public is being told they are faced with a crisis.
> This has been a problem for at least a decade.
I get you're point, but anyone that doesn't is asking "Which is
it?"
I think everyone can see there is problems. Is there a crisis? I
don't think so. Same problems we've always had, but on a
computer.
People that know tech, know these laws cross a MAJOR line. Not a
little slippery slope thing, this is off a cliff. But I don't
think most people, that are already used to having to sign in
with an online account on every device they use, even their TV,
see it as that big a step. They don't even realize how predatory
it is that they are required to sign in. What they need to see is
that the sign in requirement was a choice by the vendor. These
are LAWS, demanding no one ever be given the choice to not reveal
personal information about themselves to use ANY computer. That's
the point that needs to be driven home.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 wrote 7 hours 49 min ago:
given that it's happening simultaneously with the war on E2EE and
general purpose computing, their goals are as transparent as it gets.
the West is at this point only a decade behind China.
intended wrote 8 hours 2 min ago:
Meta is lobbying to push age verification to the OS level.
I have read the OSINT report from Reddit. The data it has is being
interpreted as Meta orchestrating a global lobbying scheme.
However the data is equally if not more supportive of Meta simply
taking advantage of global political sentiment to position itself
better.
Iâve mentioned this elsewhere, but the HN zeitgeist seems to be
resistant to the idea that tech is the âbad guyâ today.
I work in trust and safety, and have near front row seats to all the
insanity playing out today.
MildlySerious wrote 8 hours 4 min ago:
Two things can be true, and I am in the same boat. Should the next
generation have their brains fried by ad-tech corporations and their
algorithms? Absolutely not. Should the overdue off-ramp from this
trend be the on-ramp to mass-surveillance and government overreach?
Also a firm no.
svachalek wrote 4 hours 9 min ago:
Exactly. There's a clear alternative in my mind, one I'm sure is
objectionable in its own way but I think is the least evil of the
three: require providers to label their content and make them
liable for it. This allows parents to do the censoring, which is
functionally impossible now because no parent can fight the
slippery power of multibillion dollar software investments designed
to prevent them from having control over what their kids see.
jimbokun wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
So you're saying these corporations are responsible for verifying
the age of their users without verifying the age of their users?
Forgeties79 wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
Theyâre the oil barons of our day. They frack our data and output
psychological/social pollution.
ed_blackburn wrote 7 hours 8 min ago:
Absolutely: I said something similar recently:
(HTM) [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766649
benrutter wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
I really wish this take was more prominent. I really don't buy that
mass-surveillance should be required for age verification. There
are plenty of very smart people who have created much more
complicated things than a digital age verification that doesn't
track every time you use it.
This also isn't helpful, but I think the sudden push of urgency
isn't helping. The internet has existed without any kind of age
verification or safety measures for about 30 years. We could have
used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy trade
offs, but instead we've waited till now to decide that everything
has to be rushed through with minimal consideration.
OkayPhysicist wrote 2 hours 45 min ago:
You don't even need to go all high-tech with it: Children, by
nature of being children, aren't going out and buying their own
smartphones and computers. When Mom and Dad buy the device for
their kid, just punch in the kid's age before handing it to them.
That's the flow that California's age verification system uses.
Personally, I'm opposed to any age verification beyond the
current "pinky promise you're 18" type deals, but California's is
the least intrinsically offensive to me.
autoexec wrote 1 hour 5 min ago:
> When Mom and Dad buy the device for their kid, just punch in
the kid's age before handing it to them.
Doing this doesn't accomplish anything in terms of protecting
children from the harms of the internet. In fact it feeds your
child's age to marketers and child predators.
Every website will get to decide how to handle the age data our
devices will now be supplying them. In the case of facebook,
it's not as if they had no idea the children endlessly posting
selfies and posting "six seven" on their service weren't
adults.
Facebook was 100% aware that the children using their service
were children. They knew what schools those kids went to, who
their parents were, which other kids they hung out with.
Facebook knew they were children and they took advantage of
that fact.
The law California (and other states) passed doesn't define
what content has to be blocked for which ages and doesn't give
parents any ability to decide what content their children
should or shouldn't be allowed to see. It takes control away
from parents. As a parent, I might think that my 16 year old
should be allowed to look up information on STDs but the
websites that collect my child's age could decide they can't
and I'll have no say in it.
ball_of_lint wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
It's not about doesn't - the government can always claim that it
doesn't track you. That is unlikely to stay true.
It's really either they can't track you or they will track you.
jimbokun wrote 5 hours 31 min ago:
Best time to plant a tree: 30 years ago.
Second best time to plant a tree: now.
pixl97 wrote 6 hours 10 min ago:
>used that time to have a sensible conversation about policy
trade offs,
On HN itself, no way. Too many people here make far too much
money on ads to want that. It seems the other part that want
freedom also want so much freedom it gives huge corporations the
freedom to crush them.
>things than a digital age verification that doesn't track every
time you use it.
The big companies that pay the politicians don't want that,
therefore we won't get that.
jt2190 wrote 6 hours 22 min ago:
> We could have used that time to have a sensible conversation
about policy trade offs [of age verification]â¦
There is always a conversation, but it is often not the popular
one and gets drown out by whatever everyone is excited about at
the moment. You can find it if you seek it out.
Lawrence Lessigâs book âCodeâ (1999), for example, talks
about how a completely unrelated internet is an anomaly, and that
regulation will certainly be necessary, and advocates that it be
done in a thoughtful manner.
montroser wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Cost of doing business...
eqvinox wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
"We went a little over the line to figure out where the line is, so,
we can now guarantee you, dear shareholder, that we're extracting the
absolute maximum possible value! Isn't that splendid!"
groundzeros2015 wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
More like âwe found a company doing business in the EU who has
deep pockets. I bet we can get 500 mil from them and they wonât
leave.â
patrickmcnamara wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
Who issued this fine?
sizero wrote 8 hours 5 min ago:
This. Meta made $60B in net income in 2025.
ryandrake wrote 1 hour 16 min ago:
Proportionally, it's as if an individual who makes $60K a year gets
a speeding fine of $375. It might be moderately annoying, but it's
not really going to be remembered in a month.
BrtByte wrote 4 hours 51 min ago:
If you can make 60B and occasionally pay a few hundred million in
fines, the math kind of answers itself
lynndotpy wrote 7 hours 59 min ago:
Has anyone in leadership at Meta faced even the prospect of jail
time for what they've done over all these years?
bdangubic wrote 6 hours 23 min ago:
they will get congressional medals of honor sooner than that
electric_muse wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
The same company intentionally driving minors towards this content
(despite claiming to care about them) is also lobbying in secrecy for
requiring all of us to scan our ID and face in order to use our phones
and computers.
Their stated reason? Child safety.
Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
1337biz wrote 4 hours 6 min ago:
It is most likely not them but they proxie for the US. Under another
administration they would use an NGO to advance the agenda. The goal
is to facescan the world.
GuB-42 wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
The actual reason: child safety regulations
They don't care about child safety as long as it doesn't become so
bad as to impact their revenue negatively. But they see that
governments all over the world push for some kinds of age
restrictions, and they know they are a prime target and it is hard
for them to push back against that.
The reason they are (not so secretly) lobbying for requiring us to ID
ourselves at the device level is that they don't want to be the
gatekeepers. They want to make creating an account as effortless as
possible and having to prove your age is a barrier that make turn off
some people, including adults, and they may instead turn to services
that don't require age verification. By moving the age verification
in the OS, not only the responsibility shifts to the OS or hardware
vendor, but it also removes the disadvantage they have against
services that don't require age verification.
For a similar issue, PornHub is currently blocked in France, because
they don't want to comply with the law related to age verification.
Here is their argument: [1] If you read between the lines, you will
see that they have the same stance: "put age verification at the OS
level, so that people don't discriminate against us". They know they
are not in a position to argue against "child safety" laws, so
instead, they lobby for making it worse for everyone instead of just
themselves.
(HTM) [1]: https://www.aylo.com/newsroom/aylo-suspends-access-to-pornhu...
zerotolerance wrote 3 hours 43 min ago:
The other "real reason" is the solution will end up looking like a
super cookie and enable machine-level tracking across every app.
BrtByte wrote 4 hours 56 min ago:
I get the frustration, but I think it's worth separating two things:
failing at moderation vs pushing for stricter identity controls
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 43 min ago:
> is also lobbying in secrecy for requiring all of us to scan our ID
and face in order to use our phones and computers.
Youâre conflating different things. The OS-level age setting
proposals are not the same as scanning IDs and faces.
Iâm anti age check legislation, too, but the misinformation is
getting so bad that itâs starting to weaken the counter-arguments.
> Their stated reason? Child safety.
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
Weâre commenting under an article about one $375M lawsuit over
child safety and many more on the way. They are obviously being
pressured for child safety by over zealous prosecutors. This is why
they reversed course and removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram
because it was brought up as a threat to child safety.
Also your âyou can figure that outâ implication doesnât even
make sense. The proposal to move age verification to the OS level
would give Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not
Meta apps, would be responsible for gating age content. Iâm not
agreeing with the proposal, but itâs easy to see that it would be
more privacy-preserving than having to submit your ID to Meta.
dminik wrote 5 hours 0 min ago:
> The proposal to move age verification to the OS level would give
Meta less information about the user, because the OS, not Meta
apps, would be responsible for gating age content.
I find it hard to believe that meta doesn't already have a pretty
good age estimate for 95%+ of their users.
What offloading the responsibility to the app stores (or OS
vendors) gives Meta is exactly that, offloading responsibility. In
a future lawsuit, they can say that someone else provided them with
incorrect information.
giancarlostoro wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
I mean, their telemetry crap is on a lot of apps too. I remember
someone DMing me something very niche on Discord, and by chance I
opened up Facebook, it gave me ads for that very, very niche thing I
have never even looked up on Google, or Facebook, it was like
IMMEDIATE. I opened up Facebook by chance, and voila.
The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law, who
had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport grade
tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his Nest
security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very next
morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough, someone
local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't google this, I
only heard it from them.
There's some serious shenanigans going on with ad companies, and we
just seem to handwave it around.
Coincidentally, I remember both experiences very very vividly,
because this was the last time I used either platform in any
meaningful capacity.
alexfoo wrote 5 hours 19 min ago:
> The other one was the time I was speaking to my brother in law,
who had just paved his driveway, he said "I could have used airport
grade tar, but thought it was too much" and we were in front of his
Nest security cam is the only thing I can think of, but the very
next morning, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and sure enough,
someone local is advertising airport grade tar. Why? I didn't
google this, I only heard it from them.
Option A: The Nest camera not only listened to the conversation and
picked out "Airport Grade Tar" and decided it needed to show
adverts about it to people, but the camera also identified you to
the point it could isolate your FB account in order to serve you
those adverts.
(I'm making some assumptions but...)
Option B: Your brother had done various searches for airport grade
tar from his home (in order to know how expensive it was). You,
whilst visiting his home, were on his Wifi and therefore shared the
same external IP address, your phone did enough activity whilst at
his house (FB app checked in to their servers in the background, or
used Messenger, etc) to get the "thinking of buying airport grade
tar" associated with his external IP address associated with your
FB account that was temporarily on that IP.
I had a friend who was convinced that some device in his house was
listening in on his conversations with his wife as he kept on
getting adverts for things they'd been talking about buying the day
before but he hadn't searched for. (But she was searching for it
from their home wifi, which is why it appeared in his adverts
afterwards.)
hexaga wrote 4 hours 34 min ago:
Option C: no cameras or crude wifi tracing needed; they know who
you talk to / associate with based on location data and the full
profile of both sides, and can estimate things like 'will have
mentioned X' -> can dispatch that via heuristic like 'show ads
for X thing that was also mentioned by someone adjacent on that
social graph'.
That is, BiL was marked as 'spreader for airport grade tar' based
on recent activity, marked as having been in contact with
spreadee, and then spreadee was marked as having received the
spreading. P(conversion) high, so the ad is shown.
It's just contact tracing, it works well and is really easy even
without literally watching what goes on in interactions.
GreenVulpine wrote 5 hours 30 min ago:
No surprise there, Discord sells user data to Meta and X.
DivingForGold wrote 6 hours 7 min ago:
Actually. Meta is spending millions to push the age verification
requirement off to the app store providers, such as Google and Apple.
It's an attempt to shield Meta from liability, transfer it to the app
providers.
miohtama wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
They are winning.
In the UK, you cannot use App Store and iPhone (your own phone)
without verifying your identity:
(HTM) [1]: https://x.com/WindsorDebs/status/2036727466597712008
Quarrelsome wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Google play store still works fine in the UK, so idk.
miohtama wrote 3 hours 46 min ago:
Just wait and see couple of months
Quarrelsome wrote 3 hours 10 min ago:
im not aware of any law that went through parliament that
directly impacts installing apps. OSA has already hit and
didn't impact app stores. Can you link me the relevant
legislation or hansard debates?
Ajedi32 wrote 5 hours 54 min ago:
Having clear laws about what's allowed and what isn't is a lot
cheaper than getting repeatedly sued for hundreds of millions for
not doing things there was never a clear legal requirement to do.
simion314 wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
>to push the age verification requirement off to the app store
providers,
and makes more sense, Apple and Google have your credit card , or
if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then at
first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child
account.
jprjr_ wrote 4 hours 19 min ago:
> at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a
child account.
Something I would be 100% OK with is some regulation that at
first boot, you have to present information about what parental
controls are available on the device and ask if you'd like them
enabled.
I haven't set up a phone in a hot minute, I only do it once every
few years, is this something they already do?
I'd imagine there's a lot of cases where a parent buys a new
phone and hands down the old one to their kid without enabling
safety features. I don't know if there's a good way to help with
that - maybe something like, whenever you go to set a new
password, prompt "hey is this for a kid?" and go through the
safety features again?
Just spitballing, that last one may not be a good idea, not
really sure.
simion314 wrote 1 hour 57 min ago:
Exactly, I did not seen such a screen, but this giants have the
budget to hire UX experts to clearly design the initial setup
to clearly ask if this device is for a child or if is for
multiple users to make more accounts. Also to make happy the
other guy that commented they could ask you if you do not want
to sure adult content too and in that case set same flags int
he system.
Seems such a simple solution rather then each appa nd website
having to figure out a way to do it.
inetknght wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
> Apple and Google have your credit card
They don't have mine.
Even if they did, having a credit card is not proof of age.
> if you are a parent that bought soem phone for you child then
at first boot up as a parent should be your job to setup a child
account
Setting up a "child account" shouldn't involve setting some age
field. Setting up a "child account" should involve restricting
permissions.
Why leave it to the OS or a company to decide what is "age
appropriate"? Leave it to the parent to decide what the child
should or should not have access to. Extra bonus: that same
"child account" can then also be used for other restricted
purposes. Want a guest account which limits activity? Want an
incognito account? Want a sandbox account? None of these should
require setting some age.
simion314 wrote 4 hours 38 min ago:
This shit already happened years ago with consoles, i setup a
choild account and the games were restrcited and other features
also.
I am not paid by a trilion dollar company to decide if it
should be a birthday input, or a dropdown where you select your
political and religious conviction about what your child
should see. Sony figured it out, if Apple pays me I will spend
more time to write for them a UX flow so average people could
sert the accpunts up and the rest could ask their priest,
cousins or other person that can follow instructions to setup
the account for them.
The giants shoudl have solved this decades ago and not wait for
the fanatic religious to push for this as laws and get the
goverments involved, now you will get 25 different laws about
this.
rdevilla wrote 6 hours 28 min ago:
Just remember that these capacities will never be used to exonerate -
only crucify.
intrasight wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
I can't figure it out so please enlighten me.
jprjr_ wrote 4 hours 28 min ago:
Basically these age attestation/verification laws are being pushed
as a "save the children!" scenario. But if you read the laws - all
they really do is shift responsibility around.
Currently, websites and apps are supposed to ensure they don't have
kids under 13, or if they do - that they have the parents
permission. That's federal law in the US.
These laws make the operating system or app store (depends on the
particular law) responsible for being the age gate.
This doesn't stop the federal law from being enforced or anything,
but the idea is apps/websites don't handle it directly, that's
handled by the operating system or app store.
So now - companies like Meta can throw up their hands and say "hey,
the operating system told us they were of age, not our fault." It
also makes some things murkier. Now if Meta gets sued, can they
bring Google/Apple/Microsoft in as some kind of co-defendent?
I think that murkiness is the point. They don't need to create the
most bullet-proof set of regulations that 100% absolves them of all
responsibility, they just need to create enough to save some money
next time they get sued.
I can think of a ton of regulations we could create to better help
protect kids. We could mandate that mobile phones, upon first
setup, tell the user about parental controls that are available on
the device and ask if they'd like to be enabled. Establish a
baseline set of parental controls that need to be implemented and
available by phone manufacturers, like an approval process that you
need to go through to hit store shelves.
We could create educational programs. Remember being in school and
having anti-drug shit come through the school? It could be like
that but about social media (and also not like that because it
wouldn't just be "social media is bad," hopefully).
Again all these laws do is take what should be Meta's burden, and
make it everybody else's burden.
intrasight wrote 3 hours 14 min ago:
Forget about the stated reason for the laws. The fact is that it
makes sense that people using a service are age-appropriate. And
there is no market mechanism (I mean tort law) because of Section
230.
Now the easiest law change - that wouldn't required anyone to
change anything - would be to revoke Section 230. This would make
service providers liable. Everything else is a band-aid. I doubt
that this verdict will survive appeal (due to Section 230). But
if it does, then again there is no need for any new regulations.
The tort lawyers will solve the problem for us.
If we do have device age verification, then it still doesn't
shield Meta. The lawyers will sue everyone involved, and
disclosure will show if Meta had data that will have shown that
user should have been blocked.
The purpose of age verification is to avoid all this. Of course
the current proposals suck and won't achieve this. The market
will not accept an approach that would work - which would be for
anything with a screen or speaker to be permanently tied to an
individual user. "OS verification" cannot succeed - it must be
one-time hardware attestation. Even a factory reset wouldn't
remove the user assignment.
noduerme wrote 6 hours 38 min ago:
To be fair, they're just an evil corporation making lemonade out of
lemons. I'm sure they'd be happier pushing porn and nazism to
hundreds of millions of underage users, but if certain governments
want them to write all that bunk code to verify everyone's ID, they
might as well make money off the data.
philipallstar wrote 6 hours 3 min ago:
They're a lot more likely to push socialism than nazism. Hence all
the socialism and the lack of nazism.
ahoka wrote 7 hours 13 min ago:
Easy: regulation always favors incumbents.
isodev wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
Only as long as corps are allowed to lobby or introduce financial
incentives into policy making
gadflyinyoureye wrote 6 hours 58 min ago:
So any day ending in y for the US Congress?
Permit wrote 7 hours 21 min ago:
> Their actual reason? You can figure that out.
This is unfalsifiable. Just say what you think it is explicitly.
functionmouse wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Why defend Zuck??
mystraline wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
Cause on a website fellating CEOs and capitalism, "CEO's Lives
Matter".
toss1 wrote 6 hours 35 min ago:
Isn't this conversation, not publishing scientific hypotheses,
theories and findings?
If so, it is customarily permissible to use rhetoric and sarcasm to
more strongly emphasize a point. Or, to leave the conclusion as an
exercise for the reader.
Permit wrote 6 hours 26 min ago:
By intentionally hiding their position (and simultaneously acting
as though it is completely obvious) the OP shuts down any useful
conversation that might follow. Do they think Meta will sell the
user's data? Do they think different people are in charge of
different policies at Meta leading to actions that appear to be
in conflict with each other? Do they think they will use this
information to train AI models? Do they think they will use this
information to serve Ads?
There are many interesting ways that the conversation could have
been carried forward but there is no way to continue the
conservation as the OP doesn't make it clear what they think.
The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out, please
tell me what you're trying to say here.
toss1 wrote 3 hours 38 min ago:
Or, OP is not hiding their position and shutting down
conversation â they are not imposing their position and are
opening it up to discussion.
What prevents you from saying "Yes, and Xyz!!" and another
poster "Yup, and Pdq, and Foo too!"
Or, maybe OP is just being a bit lazy, but again, it seems the
context is conversation, not formal scientific inquiry where
everything must be falsifiable?
olcay_ wrote 6 hours 13 min ago:
I think they meant that Meta is offloading the cost (fines) of
farming minor's data onto the operating systems. With an
up-front cost of 2 billion dollars in lobbying, they can avoid
paying 300m+ fees regularly.
latexr wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
> The only thing I can say is: No I cannot figure it out
On the contrary, looks like you can:
> (â¦) sell the user's data (â¦) use this information to
train AI models (â¦) use this information to serve Ads
Permit wrote 6 hours 17 min ago:
Whatâs the point in providing a rebuttal to these points
(e.g. that Meta doesnât actually sell data to anyone) if
the OP can simply say âthatâs not what I meantâ?
They are taking a position that cannot be argued against or
even discussed because they donât make that position clear.
latexr wrote 4 hours 58 min ago:
> providing a rebuttal to these points (e.g. that Meta
doesnât actually sell data to anyone)
So one of your suggestions of what the OP could mean was
something you explicitly donât think is true and would
argue against? That sounds like a bad faith straw man set
up.
Perhaps itâs just as well that the OP didnât provide
one specific reason to be nitpicked ad nauseam by an army
of âwell ackshuallyâ missing the forest for the trees.
You could, as the HN guidelines suggest, argue in good
faith and steel man. The distinction between âselling
your dataâ and âprofiting from your dataâ isnât
important for a high level discussion.
Can you truly not see through Metaâs intentions? There
are entire published books, investigations, and
whistleblowers to reference. Zuckerberg called people
âdumb fucksâ for trusting him with their data and has
time and again proven to be a hypocrite who doesnât care
about anyone but himself.
thomastjeffery wrote 5 hours 29 min ago:
You are the only one arguing here. Not every conversation
is an invitation to argument.
forkerenok wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
Meta is like one giant cancer that grew a few small tumors of
benign[1] nature, like some of their efforts in open source and open
research (React, Llama, etc.).
[1]: I could be wrong thinking those are benign.
kryogen1c wrote 5 hours 48 min ago:
>Meta is like one giant cancer
Cancer is a great metaphor because its a perversion of natural,
healthy processes. So called social media is nearly that, but
actually grotesquely unhealthy.
People are dramatically unwell when they are not social, but that
unregulated process is also negative up to and including being
lethal.
rel_ic wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
Being on "social media" is a fundamentally unsocial activity: you
do it alone, it makes you lonely, and it separates you from
others. Some people manage to bootstrap a social layer on top of
the base medium, but most are being driven apart for profit.
I call it _anti_social media.
rolandog wrote 5 hours 4 min ago:
Exactly. It started out as something good: see what friends and
family are up to. But now: scroll infinite algorithmically
placed or sponsored rage bait trying to trigger you into behaving
the way that advances certain corporate or foreign interests at
the expense of whatever was left of our already tattered social
fabric and our collective mental or literal health.
1over137 wrote 4 hours 55 min ago:
> It started out as something good
No it didnât. That was just like the first free sample from
the drug dealer. Give a âgoodâ free service to rope them
in, always with the next steps in mind.
danny_codes wrote 3 hours 30 min ago:
OG Facebook was perfectly fine. In your analogy itâd be
more like someone replacing your Diet Coke with actual
cocaine. Like, yeah Diet Coke isnât great for you, but
itâs not cocaine.
Quarrelsome wrote 4 hours 33 min ago:
I disagree. I feel like earlier social networks hadn't yet
huffed the "lean startup" gas and weren't obsessed with
engagement and thus were not yet trying to hook their users
into an engagement cycle like where we are today.
I feel like the Myspace/Friendster and early Facebook were
nowhere near as harmful (albeit for addiction, those sites
were still vulnerable to grooming) as where we are today.
mnw21cam wrote 6 hours 2 min ago:
I think Zstandard would be the most benign example.
ozgrakkurt wrote 6 hours 0 min ago:
Zstandard was created by one amazing person. Pretty sure he would
have done it even if meta didn't exist.
netfortius wrote 6 hours 24 min ago:
A few weeks after they expanded access beyond .edu domains, I
deleted my account. Haven't looked back since. Not an ounce of
regret.
philipallstar wrote 6 hours 4 min ago:
Exactly. Why should furrin students get a look in?
rdevilla wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
Facebook was the Eternal September of the Web. Netiquette died when
it was made generally available, as did the culture that spawned
it.
Aurornis wrote 5 hours 38 min ago:
I think you can tell approximately how old someone is by when
they believe Eternal September started on the internet. Nobody
believes it was when they started enjoying the internet. It was
always when some other generation or service arrived after them.
The internet was not a calm and well behaved place before
Facebook arrived. The original âEternal Septemberâ was in the
early 90s. Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every
other social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior
long before Facebook came along.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 4 hours 59 min ago:
Can confirm.
Source: I was a bad, bad, boi, on UseNet.
ghurtado wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
So many words and you missed the most important one:
"netiquette"
That's the whole point: the word exists precisely as a
testament to something that used to exist but now doesn't.
Anybody old enough to remember the word when it was common use
should realize that it would have been impossible for the term
to be coined in 2026.
If you missed that part of the Internet (maybe you were too
young or maybe you were focused on other things, like the vast
majority of people in the 90s), that's totally fine, but plenty
of us did experience it and remember it pretty clearly.
> Usenet, forums, Reddit, comment sections, and every other
social part of the internet have been full of bad behavior long
before Facebook came along.
You can tell approximately how old someone is by whether they
have reached the "everything sucks" part of life yet or not.
plagiarist wrote 5 hours 13 min ago:
Eternal September started before I was on the internet, but
there have been several similar shifts since then.
It gets continually worse. Agentic AI is another Eternal
September. For example, we now have dimwits sending dozens of
unsolicited and unreviewed slop PRs to open source projects.
Every search result is an affiliate marketing listicle
obviously written by a robot.
rdevilla wrote 5 hours 25 min ago:
Hence... "of the web." IRC is and always was a cesspool but at
least they had heard of netiquette, and it was something you
could choose to partake in - or not, for the lulz. Nobody said
anything about being "calm and well behaved" in particular.
h2zizzle wrote 6 hours 6 min ago:
As a Millennial, I'm sad to say that it wasn't even older
generations' fault, but our own (+Gen X). The tipping point was
letting in normies who traded in photos and money instead of text
and art.
rdevilla wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early
Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy) ensured
that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus you had,
let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated in one
(forum of) fora.
LLMs are now heralding the Eternal September of even software
engineering, and now I am wondering where to hang up my
Techpriest robes in search of more elite pastures.
I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar were
allowed to study scripture not in the original spiritual
programming languages of Hebrew or Latin, but English.
h2zizzle wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
Elitism and selectivity were actually features of the early
Internet. High barriers to entry (tech savvy, literacy)
ensured that there was a high signal to noise ratio, and thus
you had, let's say, upper quartile participants concentrated
in one (forum of) fora.
I disagree. I'm of the Neopets/Pokemon forums generation.
Elitism and selectivity were not what made that era a good
balance between the caustic free-for-all we have now and the
rich kid's playground from before. It was the technical and
practical restrictions on what you could put in and get out
of a web experience.
You couldn't upload thousands of thirst traps every month,
because storage was limited. You couldn't summon another head
of the dropshipping or affiliate marketing hydras with a few
clicks, because the infrastructure didn't exist. You couldn't
inundate users with dark patterns designed to extract every
ounce of attention, data, and cash possible, because the rich
web wasn't that rich yet.
You had to deal in text and reasonably-sized images on a CRT
with a limited-bandwidth pipe feeding it all. Because of
this, many of the techniques developed to transform so many
other forms of media and so many other institutions into
Capitalist hellscapes and high school, respectively, didn't
work online. Until they did.
echelon wrote 4 hours 44 min ago:
> I am wondering where to hang up my Techpriest robes in
search of more elite pastures.
Capital and tech improvement will beat anyone chasing that.
ghurtado wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
> I wonder if this is how the clergy felt once the vulgar
were...
You meant the "vulgus". "Vulgar" has the same root, but a
very different meaning.
This random thought is kinda disconnected from actual human
history. "Not allowed to study Scripture" was not a thing:
Illiteracy was. There were people that knew how to read and
people who didn't, that's it.
I'm trying hard (and failing) to visualize your mental image.
"Dear Father: it looks like the Bible has been translated to
English by my dear brothers up at the monastery. I'm sure you
understand why I can no longer be a priest"
Remember that you're living in the actual earth timeline, not
the 40k one.
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
I mean, one can always get an older machine and code
everything as holy binary chant not only impress the
youngsters, but also impose level of distance from the
'limited by llms'.
FWIW, I like the analogy despite seeing a benefit to knowing
the original languages to studying scripture.
foobarian wrote 5 hours 36 min ago:
And Greek! Don't forget Greek
-emacs user
SecretDreams wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Everything consumer facing from meta is like a toxic waste hazard.
It makes me sad seeing people stuck on those platforms.
tietjens wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
React benign? Thatâs the first time Iâve seen this suggestion
on HN. Usually itâs held responsible for great crimes and wrongs.
muskyFelon wrote 5 hours 57 min ago:
Ha, I think the great crimes and wrongs title goes to Angular. I
became a front-end guy specifically to avoid all the OOP
verbosity. I'm just trying to call some APIs and render some data
on a web page. I don't need layers of abstraction to do that.
Anyways, is there a "just use vue" effort like there is with
postgres :)
mhitza wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
Of course it's for the protection of the children!
Why else would they want to sneakily add facial recognition to smart
glasses?! /s
(HTM) [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-ray-ban-smart-glasses-f...
Akronymus wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
My guess: to discriminate whether traffic is from a humam or bot to
improve ad delivery metrics.
moolcool wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Aren't they incentive to treat bot impressions as real?
Manuel_D wrote 5 hours 14 min ago:
Not quite. If it's widely known that bot impressions aren't being
filtered out, then people are less likely to place ads with Meta.
iamacyborg wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Not if they can charge more for âcertifiedâ human impressions
modo_mario wrote 6 hours 36 min ago:
Most sites are not going to implement this themselves.
I think they're in prime position to become a key broker of
identity in the same way that a lot of people already log in with
their meta or google account to unrelated websites.
They become very entrenched and get a ton of data that way.
As more and more people essentially lock themselves in with these
identitybrokers tho I imagine it has a very stifling effect on
speech tho. Imagine getting banned from those.
cwmoore wrote 8 hours 20 min ago:
Seems insufficient to keep Social Security solvent after 2040.
Are the kids alright?
ourmandave wrote 8 hours 43 min ago:
Do we have to wait for any appeals before the performative mail out
settlement checks for $1 routine?
rubyfan wrote 8 hours 29 min ago:
Or the settlements goes to the state and no one ever sees a dollar.
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